Vamps & Tramps New Essays ( 1994) By Camille Anna Paglia

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Books by CAM II.I.E PAGLIA

Vamps and Tramps: New Essays

Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

Sexual Personae:
Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

VAMPS
&

TRAMPS

NEW ESSAYS

CAMILLE PAGLI A

VI NTAGE BOOKS

A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, NOVEMBER 1994

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © 1994 by Camille Paglia

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Paglia, Camille
Vamps and tramps : new essays / Camille Paglia. — 1st ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
"A Vintage original."
ISBN 0-679-75120-3
1. Popular culture — United States — History — 20th century.
2. Arts, American. 3. Arts, Modern — 20th century — United
States. 4. American literature — 20th century — History and
criticism. I. Title.
E169.12.P334 1994
306.4'0973— dc20 94-12191
CIP

Pages 531-32 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION IX

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

The Penis Unsheathed 3

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

No Law in the Arena: a Pagan Theory of Sexuality 1 9

1. Introduction: The Horses of Passion 19

2. Sex Crime: Rape 24

3. Sex War: Abortion, Battering, Sexual

Harassment 38

4. Sex Power: Prostitution, Stripping,

Pornography 56

5. Rebel Love: Homosexuality 67

6. Conclusion: Citizens of the Empire 92

THE CULTURE WARS

The Nursery-School Campus: The Corrupting of

the Humanities in the U.S. 97

Gay Stalinism 103
The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon

and Andrea Dworkin 1 07

The New Sexism: Liberating Art and Beauty 1 1 3

An Open Letter to the Students of Harvard 1 1 7

On Censorship 1 22

V

V I

CONTENTS

POP THEATER

Woody Allen Agonistes 1 29

Our Tabloid Princess: Amy Fisher 133

The Female Lenny Bruce: Sandra Bernhard 1 37

Brooklyn Nefertiti: Barbra Streisand 141

Lolita Unclothed 146

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

Diana Regina 1 63

Television and the Clintons 1 72

Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton 176

Hillary in the Spotlight 181
Laying the Ghost of Anita Hill:

Bill Clinton and Paula Jones 188

Mona Lisa in Motion: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 191

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

The Saint 1 97
My Brothers in Crime: Benderson, Jarratt,

Feld, Fessenden 201
Dr. Paglia: Part 1 of Female Misbehavior,

A Four-Part Documentary by Monika Treut 234

Sex War: A Short Film by Luca Babini 250

Glennda and Camille Do Downtown 277

ON LITERATURE AND ART

Gypsy Tigress: Carmen 307

Alice as Epic Hero 3 1 2

Love Poetry 317
Tournament of Modern Personae:

D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love 328
Breviary of the Nude: Kenneth Clark's

The Nude 339

The Artistic Dynamics of "Revival" 341

Sontag, Bloody Sontag 344

CONTENTS vii

BOOK REVIEWS

The Star as Sacred Monster
David Shipman's

Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend 363
Madonna in the Shallows
Madonna's

Sex 367
Madonna as Gauguin
Mark Bego's

Madonna: Blonde Ambition 370
Tyranny of the Technocrats
John Ralston Saul's

Voltaire's Bastards 375
A Woman of the Century
Germaine Greer's

The Change 379
Scholar, Aesthete, Activist
Edward Said's

Culture and Imperialism 382
The Corpse of Fashion
Fred Davis's

Fashion 3 Culture, and Identity 387
Cry of the Invisible Men
Warren Farrell's

The Myth of Male Power 391

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

Ask Camille Paglia: Advice for the Lovelorn,

Among Others 397

Feminist Fatale 4 1 o

Bobbitt Versus Bobbitt 4 1 9

Diary: Sex, Art, and Selling 421

Extracts 425

APPENDICES

Cartoon Personae 439
A Media Chronicle 457

INDEX

519

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book evokes the missing sexual personae of
contemporary feminism. Vamps are queens of the night, the pri-
meval realm excluded and repressed by today's sedate middle-class
professionals in their orderly, blazing bright offices. The prostitute,
seductress, and high-glamour movie star wield woman's ancient
vampiric power over men. That power is neither rational nor meas-
urable. The Apollonian rules we pass to govern the workplace will
never fully control the demonic impulses of Dionysian night. Sexual
equality before the law — the first great goal of modern feminism —
cannot so easily be transferred to our emotional lives, where woman
rules. Art and pornography, not politics, show us the real truth about
sex.

I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the
lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to
smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of
the Fifties. The "nice" girl, with her soft, sanitized speech and dec-
orous manners, had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with
her — in the official spokesmen and anointed heiresses of the feminist
establishment. White middle-class personae have barely changed.
Getting women out of the kitchen and into the office, we have sim-
ply put them into another bourgeois prison. The panoramic Sixties

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INTRODUCTION

vision, inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism, called the entire West-
ern career system into question. But that insight has been lost.

The beatniks, the generation of dissenters before mine, went "on
the road" — not just physically, like Jack Kerouac, but spiritually.
Allen Ginsberg, the New York Walt Whitman, made wayfaring
songs of an exile in his own land. Fusing Hindu and Hebrew chant
with African-American jazz rhythms, Ginsberg reenergized the pur-
ist folk style of Bob Dylan, my generation's hobo troubadour, who
went on to make rock 'n' roll an art form. In "Like a Rolling Stone,"
Dylan forces his faithless heroine to confront the blank-eyed "mys-
tery tramp," who is both the artist and personified death, the reality
of extinction that defines life itself. "Think for yourself," said the
Beatles, and let your mind roam "where it will go." The tramp is
a rover, exploring the wilderness outside the status quo.

Until the end of the Fifties, a sexually free woman was called a
"tramp," that is, a vagrant or streetwalker, a whore. Joan Rivers's
gleefully insatiable Heidi Abromowitz, dashing to the dock to greet
the fleet, was the dark alter ego of the chaste middle-class girl. We
must reclaim the Whore of Babylon, the nature goddess of that
complex city of arrogant male towers and hanging female gardens.
Vamps and tramps are Babylonian personae, pagan outcasts. They
live again in our bold drag queens and gay hustlers, midnight cow-
boys of the urban canyons. An episode of the Perry Mason television
series, starring Raymond Burr, was called The Case of the Vagabond
Vixen. Female sexuality, freed from Judeo-Christian sequestration,
returns to animal nature. The woman "on the stroll" (streetwalking)
is a prowler and predator, self-directed and no one's victim.

Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the re-
moval of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and
professional world — but not at the price of special protections for
women, which are infantilizing and anti-democratic. As a Sixties
libertarian, I also oppose overregulation of sexuality, which has risen
to a totalitarian extreme over the past decade in America. The
culture is at risk when civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of
career success. Professional functioning in the Apollonian capitalist
machine — which I laud as the vehicle of woman's modern libera-
tion — must not be confused with full human identity. Nor can office

INTRODUCTION

XI

politics dictate our understanding of sexuality, which begins as a
force of nature outside the social realm.

White middle-class style, despite the Sixties rebellion, still
tyrannizes us, because corporate business, with the streamlined
efficiency of the profit-based work ethic, was born in Protestant
Northern Europe, before and after the industrial revolution. It has
been puritanical and desensualized from the start. Bland on the
surface and seething with Darwinian hostility below, office manners
grind down and homogenize all ethnic and racial differences. The
world is going WASP. We must scrutinize and monitor business
operations when corporations corner monopolies or mushroom into
faceless global mega-entities rivaling nation-states, but business
style, fetishizing the white Protestant persona, may be beyond re-
form, because it is simply too effective.

We need to recast the daily dramas of our public theater. Med-
itating on vamps and tramps makes us see the decorous borders of
professional life. In calling for a "room of one's own," Virginia Woolf
created a central metaphor of twentieth-century feminism. Emily
Dickinson, by a turn of the key, had achieved that secure mental
space, but she was the daughter and sister of successful lawyers. A
perquisite of privilege and prosperity, the "room of one's own" was
already too bourgeois for my subversive generation, whose brash
rock spirit counsels: Get out of the house, and keep on running. A
car of one's own, the great equalizer, is more the mode of American
Amazonism. On the open highway, battling stormy nature and dodg-
ing mammoth eighteen-wheelers (today's piratical tramp freighters),
woman has never been more mobile, more capable of the archetypal
journey of the heroic quest, a traditionally masculine myth.

The new tramp is not a displaced person, except insofar as he
or she is a refugee from the prison of the nuclear family. Life is a
condition of searching for meaning — an active and affirmative pro-
cess, unlike the bunkered defeatism of modernism and postmodern-
ism. The multicultural twenty-first century will also require ^search,
as we drift further and further from our ethnic origins. By the prin-
ciple of what I call creative duality, we must recover and celebrate
our ethnic roots, while at the same time identifying ourselves with
the spiritual homelessness of the tramp. The task is to balance phil-

XII

INTRODUCTION

osophical detachment, the isolated consciousness, with a sense of
community and engagement with social issues.

Overprotected in the paternalistic past, women have a special
obligation to liberate their personae. Male adventurism has always
been a costly, painful privilege. When the office — by which I mean
the whole complex of word-based, smoothly cooperative white-collar
work, in business or academe — becomes the primary paradigm of
new female achievement, women have cut themselves off from the
risk-taking, rough-and-tumble experiences that have always tough-
ened men. Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers
they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse
in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent
trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to
overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote per-
sonal responsibility. Women must not become wards and suppliants
of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency.

Creative duality also applies to female self-definition. Hyper-
development of the Apollonian office persona during the day — cru-
cial if women are to advance to leadership — necessitates contrary
measures for psychic health. Vamp and tramp, as vivid mental
states, must be given nocturnal Dionysian license. My brand of
streetwise feminism demands aggressive guerrilla tactics of speed,
subterfuge, and surprise. The street walk and street talk, big and
brassy, are polar opposites of the reserved, compressed body lan-
guage and modest, subdued voices required by the professional world
in its contained spaces. The street is nature, the open savanna with
its long sightlines and the raw, exuberant energies of hunt and pur-
suit. Communication is African call-and-response, loud because it
must cover great distances. I am acutely aware of the difficult tran-
sition from working class to middle class, since I have identified, to
my career detriment, with the assertive, theatrical style of my grand-
parents' generation (my maternal grandfather worked in a shoe
factory) rather than with the discreet good manners of my parents'
generation, who sought social assimilation in America.

Vamps and tramps are the seasoned symbols of tough-cookie
feminism, my answer to the smug self-satisfaction and crass mate-
rialism of yuppie feminism. I admire the hard-bitten, wisecracking
realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering

INTRODUCTION

XIII

white girls with their princess fantasies. The twenty-first hexagram
of the / Ching is Shih Ho, "Biting Through," which represents the
forcible overcoming of obstacles. No more sweets. No more placebos
or false assurances. The eating disorders that plague bourgeois fem-
inism are the regressive rituals of docile daughters who, on some
level, refuse to fend for themselves. As an Italian-American child, I
was fed wild black mushrooms, tart dandelion greens, spiny arti-
chokes, and tangy olives flecked with red pepper flakes. These were
life lessons in the sour and prickly, the bitter herbs eaten in the
tramp's clothes of leavetaking. Auntie Mame, my campy guru, liked
to say, "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to
death." The theme of Vamps and Tramps is wanderlust, the erotic,
appetitive mind in free movement.

The word "vamp," in the sense of a sexual seductress, is Slavic
in origin and descends from the Serbo-Croatian vampire legends of
the bloody Balkans. Our language has a second, less glamourous
"vamp," this one with French roots, by way of Middle English.
Derived from shoemaking (the ancestral trade of my mother's region
in Italy), it describes the leather instep of a boot, the thing that is
"in the front," "avant/' as in the military and later artistic term,
"avant-garde" or vanguard. Eventually, to "vamp" meant saving
or repairing something old by patching it with a new piece — that
is, using ingenuity, cleverness, and commonplace practicality to
achieve your aims. From there it entered vaudeville and jazz: in
musical accompaniment, "vamping" means improvising, orna-
menting, pumping up the excitement.

I take vamping in this second sense to describe my interpretative
style, in classroom teaching, public lectures, and cultural criticism.
Improvisation in the modern performing arts is ultimately a product
of Romanticism's stress on energy, originality, spontaneity, and emo-
tional truth, as opposed to the gleaming technical perfection, ar-
chitectural symmetry, and cerebral didacticism of neoclassicism. I
don't want to throw out the old songs; I want to update, customize,
and supercharge them. I want to put the bomp back into the bomp-
de-domp. Improv, analogous to Freudian free association, takes you
by startling leaps and pulses to the heart of the matter. It is Dionysian
logic, sensory and surreal. Vision comes in psychedelic flashes. "Hot
tramp!" David Bowie says to a pagan rogue in "Rebel, Rebel." The

XIV

INTRODUCTION

guardians of culture must return to homage and ecstasy. Rifting and
jamming on the classics, we can both corrupt and redeem them.

Vamps and Tramps began a year ago as a proposal by my editor
for a second collection of essays. My first, Sex, Art, and American
Culture (1992), documented the period following the release of my
700-page scholarly study, Sexual Personae (1990), when I was drawn
into national controversies over date rape, sexual harassment, cen-
sorship, political correctness, poststructuralism, the literary canon,
women's studies, gay studies, multiculturalism, the role of television,
and, last but not least, Madonna. The second volume of Sexual
Personae, on modern popular culture, was completed in 1981 but is
currently being revised to incorporate the thousands of note cards
that have accumulated over the intervening decade and a half. That
volume, like the first, will be released in hardcover by Yale Uni-
versity Press.

I was asked to write an essay, to serve as the centerpiece of
Vamps and Tramps, about the newly contentious debate over homo-
sexuality and biology, on which I had begun to speak out. I felt I
should produce instead a more general statement of my sexual phi-
losophy, in which homosexuality would have its place. Hence the
main essay here, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sex-
uality," which systematically presents my libertarian views of rape,
abortion, battering, sexual harassment, prostitution, stripping, por-
nography, homosexuality, pedophilia, and transvestism. My guiding
principle is a strict separation between the public and private
spheres. The sanctity of the latter must be preserved and defended.
The state should have no power to oversee or regulate solitary or
consensual activities, such as suicide or sodomy. Hence I strongly
support the legalization of drugs and prostitution, and I am an
extreme advocate of the most lurid forms of pornography.

In the four years since I arrived on the scene (after an ill-starred
career that included job problems, poverty, and the rejection of Sexual
Personae by seven major publishers), there has been a dramatic shift
in thought in America. The fascist rigidity of political correctness,
in academe and the media, has begun to melt. Heretical ideas that,
when I expressed them in essays and lectures in 1991 and 1992, got

INTRODUCTION

XV

me pilloried and picketed, in a torrent of abuse and defamation,
have now become common coin. My terminology and frame of analy-
sis have passed into general usage. These are matters for the his-
torical record, always clearer from a distance than in the chaotic
present. My strategy has been to change the climate of ideas around
the academic and feminist establishment, in order to shrink its power
base. I have used aggressive "strikes," based on war and (my favorite
sport) football, to damage and punish false leaders. My favorite
weapon has been satire, which I studied in Horace, Juvenal, Ra-
belais, Pope, Swift, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan, and Mad magazine.

My meteoric rise — actually, this was the axiomatic "overnight
success that took twenty years" — was partly due to a restlessness
in America, a fatigue with dated ideology and an impatience with
establishment insularity and impotence. These forces contributed to
the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton, a relatively unknown
governor of a provincial agricultural state (whom I continue to sup-
port, despite my public criticism of his managerial errors). As an
ornery outsider of prickly eccentricity and raw populist humor, I
was a parallel phenomenon to businessman-turned-politician Ross
Perot and radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern,
with their gigantic nationwide following. We have widely different
political views, but all four of us, with our raging egomania and
volatile comic personae tending toward the loopy, helped restore
free speech to America.

Since the publication of Sex, Art, and American Culture ', I have
been particularly encouraged by three books. One was published
by Cambridge University Press in 1989: Colin Falck's intricately
interdisciplinary Myth, Truth, and Literature: Towards a True Post-
Modernism. When it came my way in early 1993, I immediately
ordered twenty copies and sent them to leading scholars around the
country: this, I prophesied, was the future of literary criticism —
after the long overdue death of that ugly octopus, poststructuralism.
The first words I saw on flipping open Falck's book were "Susanne
Langer." I whooped with joy. Langer is the distinguished philoso-
pher whose work on aesthetics was widely read and admired in the
Sixties. When, in the process of writing my academic expose, "Junk
Bonds and Corporate Raiders," I spent six months reviewing the

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INTRODUCTION

past two decades of jargon-ridden literary theory, I was appalled at
the total absence of Langer's name — more proof of the ineptitude
of the current humanities professoriat.

The two other works deal with feminism. Last year appeared
27-year-old Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism
on Campus^ an eloquent, thoughtful, finely argued book that was
savaged from coast to coast by shallow, dishonest feminist book
reviewers (a welcome exception being Wendy Kaminer). Just re-
leased in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers's landmark study Who Stole
Feminism?, which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shock-
ing fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the ser-
vility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist
manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be
required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous ac-
ademic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically
critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse
for it. Her activism predated by several years the publication of my
long-delayed first book. Sommers has done a great service for women
and for feminism, whose fundamental principles she has clarified
and strengthened.

The themes of Vamps and Tramps continue those of Sex, Art, and
American Culture. The progressive principles of the Sixties must be
rescued from the brackish bog of political correctness into which
they have sunk. My highest ideals are free thought and free speech.
I condemn all speech codes and espouse offensiveness for its own
sake, as a tool of attack against received opinion and unexamined
assumptions. My heroes are the libertines of the Enlightenment and
the aesthetes of the nineteenth-century Decadence. Science and art —
intellect and imagination — must be reintegrated for a complete vi-
sion of the universe.

As a militant reformer of feminism and academe, I have followed
the Sixties design of protest and opposition. The corrupt palace elites,
arrogant with power, must be exposed and brought to justice every-
where, whether they are in the literature departments at Harvard
and Princeton or in the headquarters of the National Organization
for Women, which at the moment is merely an outpost of the Gloria
Steinem coterie. Those who have poisoned the cultural atmosphere

INTRODUCTION

XVII

in America or gained high position by unethical means must be held
accountable. It's Nuremberg time.

Sex, Art, and American Culture was secretly aimed toward students
and seems to have succeeded in its mission. It is a handbook for
the Resistance. I am arming the rebels. For example, "Junk Bonds
and Corporate Raiders," paragraph by paragraph, is a set of can
openers by which dissenters can pry open the solipsistically sealed
discourse of poststructuralism. I seek no followers. I am an irasci-
ble Aries warrior rather than a politician or diplomat. My kind
takes the beachhead and pushes the Nazis back; others make the
treaties. Neither was I a ' 'follower" per se of Allen Ginsberg, Marshall
McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, or Leslie Fiedler. But those radical
thinkers broke through the conventions of tradition and allowed us
of the Sixties to find our own voices. That is what I would like to do
for the students of the Nineties.

We need a general theory of culture. Without it, multicultur-
alism is nonsense. My synoptic work, taking in the full spectrum
from high art to popular culture, was inspired by German philology,
which I encountered via my childhood passion for archaeology. The
great Schools of Oriental Studies — now routinely defamed as racist
and imperialist by puerile New Historicists and others — were pos-
ited on the philological model. The latter represents a multilayered
view of society, where everything, from trivia to treasure, counts.
Religion, politics, law, language, literature, art, architecture, agri-
culture, husbandry, medicine, commerce, courtship, food prepara-
tion, domestic management: the analyst of culture must be able to
range freely among all the elements of ordinary and extraordinary
life. The story is in the details, scattered fragments into which the
scholar breathes life.

My program of educational reform begins on the primary-school
level, which has been irresponsibly ignored by our academic pseudo-
leftists, whose idea of political action is nattering about Foucault to
each other at conferences. Urban public schools have been allowed
to decline disastrously since my mother emigrated from Italy in the
Thirties and since I was rigorously educated in the Fifties and early
Sixties. I favor a simple, back-to-basics curriculum centered on world
history, science, and the arts, and I call for a return to the strict

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INTRODUCTION

immigrant-era policy of expulsion of disorderly students, to protect
the classroom for economically disadvantaged children who want to
learn. Education is the foundation stone of true social justice.

National standards, like those of the New York State Regents
exams that ruled my youth, are necessary, but administrative bu-
reaucracies must be reduced and teachers given more power. I view
bilingual instruction as shortsighted and counterproductive, and I
oppose all social-welfare meddling in public education: condom dis-
tribution belongs in public health clinics, not schools, and forcing
gay issues into the curriculum is an outrageous act of cultural im-
perialism by white middle-class ideologues against the working class
for whom they claim to speak. Deep social change takes time and
cannot be achieved by fiat. Sex must be kept out of the totalitarian
grip of philanthropists and preachers of every stripe.

On the college level, reform has been stymied by two forces.
First, a sterile liberal versus conservative debate has polarized the
campuses and prevented authentic self-critique. These political po-
sitions are simplistic and outmoded. We must take the best from
the left and the best from the right to devise new strategies for the
global twenty-first century. The reluctance of liberal professors to
speak out against rampant abuses committed on their side (e.g.,
suppression of free speech, the excesses of women's studies and
French theory) has simply increased the power of the right.

Progressive values are damaged when the left has lost touch
with reality and when the plain voice of common sense is heard
mainly on the right. Conservative Christian organizations have made
enormous gains in America because most of their issues are legiti-
mate ones that have been misunderstood, misrepresented, or treated
with sophomoric disrespect by what Dan Quayle correctly called
the "cultural elite." The only way to slow or stop the national drift
to the right is for intellectuals to reclaim these issues and method-
ically recast them, one by one, in a new progressive language com-
prehensible to middle America but divested of narrow Christian
moralism. The people can and must be pulled back toward the
center. Civil liberties, as the Sixties understood them, are at stake.

The process of curricular reform has been complicated by the
insularity of humanities faculty, most of whom seem naively obliv-
ious to the political complexities and inner turbulence of contem-

INTRODUCTION

x i x

porary America. The second force frustrating reform is the academic
career system, which has gotten tangled up with politics, since am-
bitious, apolitical literature teachers discovered in the Seventies and
Eighties that easily learned leftist posturing brought professional
prestige and advancement. The politics of these vinyl carpetbaggers
consist mainly of empty rhetoric — and of currying favor with other
academics.

Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Profes-
sors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire
economics-driven machinery of American academe — the wasteful
multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspeciali-
zation, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion,
the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploi-
tation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience
of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the
ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.

The failure of academe to reform itself from within was com-
pounded by the negligence and inertness of what used to be called
the "alternative press," which in the political correctness debate
astonishingly aligned itself with the tenured professors of the elite
schools. For example, The Village Voice, which I read devoutly in the
Sixties and early Seventies, had so collapsed into confusion and
irrelevance that its derisive 1991 cover story denying the existence
of political correctness (and picturing me as a "counterfeit feminist"
bandit "Wanted for Intellectual Fraud") was quickly accepted for
republication by the Yale Journal of Criticism. Something is wrong in
the culture when there is such collusion between the establishment
and the old forces of critique. For twenty years, the alternative press,
nationwide, has been irresponsibly mute about the venal careerism
of academe, which drove my generation into the wilderness.

Most professors know that American higher education in the
humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps
through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like
moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before
loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'etre for educational
institutions. How many more young minds must be distorted or
destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellec-
tual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge?

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INTRODUCTION

Only the West produced the scientific techniques and speculative
analysis of geology, paleontology, and archaeology, which have re-
vealed and preserved the world past.

I end my public lectures with a mantra for the students: "Hate
dogma. Love learning. Love art." What sorry pass have we come
to when such sentiments are judged dangerously radical? Learning,
not facile theory, must be the primary criterion (with teaching ability
second) for the hiring and promotion of faculty. The new interdis-
ciplinary era, which I support, requires an even deeper commitment
to learning than before, but standards have actually weakened. The
venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate
school may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were
men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the
elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.

My aim is to build a coalition for educational reform consisting
of concerned persons across the political spectrum. The supreme
principles of free thought and free speech transcend all party affil-
iations. I think I am alone in proposing a plan for world education.
International understanding must have some basis in common ter-
minology, which can best be articulated through traditional means,
the solid scholarship of a revamped old historicism. We need a plan
that is simultaneously a great expansion and a great simplification —
that is, a moving outward to take in the vastness of global multi-
culturalism and a reordering, by severe process of elimination, of
the organizing themes for that huge body of material.

My program offers comparative religion as a core curriculum
for the world. I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man's
greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-
core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imag-
ination to educate the young. Flicking the radio dial in America,
one hears bursts of beautiful, spellbinding poetry. But it is neither
academics nor contemporary writers who are filling the air with
dazzling imagery and profound spiritual truths. Alas for progressive
politics, these are the voices of white and black Christian ministers,
reading from the Bible. Why have intellectuals abandoned the peo-
ple? This is the shame of modernism. High Romanticism at least
gave poetry as the prize of rebellion and, turning from God, put
nature in his place.

INTRODUCTION

XXI

Everyone in the world should know all the great religions of the
world: Hinduism; Buddhism; Greco-Roman and Near Eastern pa-
ganism; Judeo-Christianity; Islam; African, North American, and
Oceanic tribal cults; pre-Columbian imperial myth. Art, history,
and philosophy are intertwined with the evolution of religion. This
is the true multiculturalism. The secularism of the Enlightenment
was meant to free the mind, not kill the soul. In the spirit of the
eighteenth-century encyclopedists and revolutionaries, we must keep
church and state separate, even while we preserve the eternal insights
and metaphors of religion. Authority belongs to the classroom, not
the pulpit.

Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of
religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal. The Sixties
wanted to break the oppressive moral codes of organized religion,
to attain vision by a daring individualism. But we left the generations
who came after us in a spiritual vacuum. The young are struggling
for identity in a world defined by material uncertainties and ineq-
uities, surreally juxtaposed pockets of feast and famine. Hence their
vulnerability to political correctness, the only religion they know.
They crave spiritual food, and the elite schools have given them the
bitter ashes of nihilism. Everything inspiring or ennobling has been
befouled for them by their crabbed, callous professors, who do not
deserve the name "teacher." My efforts to restore the unfashionable
concept of "greatness" to critical discourse are part of my evangelical
mission in the service of the Hellenic religion of art, whose homo-
erotic prophets have risen again and again since the Renaissance.

My plan is a fusion of archaism and futurism. Much of the
acrimony of academic debate has come from a misapplication of the
Sixties' demand for "relevance." Universities should not be brokers
of the contemporary. The purpose of education is to open the remote
past to the students, so that they can learn from the voluminous
human record of mistakes and triumphs. Professors have no business
telling students about the present. The students are the present, and
month by month, they are creating the future. Stop oppressing them
with exhausted paradigms of the recent past. Each time a professor
sets foot in the classroom, he or she is already history.

The "vamping" style that I endorse weaves references to the
present throughout all interpretation of the past. Every teacher must

XXII

INTRODUCTION

become a bard, a living archive and singer of sagas. "Only connect,"
said E.M. Forstcr. Education must center on primary texts, the
major artworks so complex and elusive that they have haunted gen-
eration after generation. None of us understands them fully. We
must present them to the students, then get out of the way. Great
art radiates — an uncanny aura beyond good or evil. We literally
"expose" ourselves to it, never knowing its deepest effects until years
or decades later.

On the Moebius strip of the human psyche, the future meets
the past. I recognize the austere elegance and gravity of ancient
Egyptian ritualism in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a television series
(1987-94) that speaks to the universalist longings of the post-Sixties
era. Technology has become like a second skin. The heroic spirit of
maligned Columbus still pushes into space, Star Trek's "final fron-
tier." Its plot lines wavering between cooperation and militance, the
program recapitulates the Oresteia's contest between law and law-
lessness, civilization and barbarism. And Star Trek accepts, without
paternalistic sentimentality, the grotesque differentness of peoples,
even their mutual physical repulsiveness.

The current multicultural metaphor of the "rainbow" is com-
pletely wrong. Cultures will never coexist in placid, symmetrical
bands. There is no way, for example, that the opulent African aes-
thetic of luxurious textures and brilliant colors, produced by the
tropical sun, can ever fully comprehend or be comprehended by the
sensuality-suppressing corporate WASP aesthetic of clean-lined "un-
derstated" designs and "tasteful" muted tones — beige, bone, char-
coal, navy. One cancels out the other. Conflict is unavoidable.

My master metaphor for culture is the river, with its nourishing
tributaries and churning cataracts. It conveys the real majesty of
the world's historical traditions. Art comes cascading down to us
from shadowy origins, like the allegorical Nile whose head is mys-
teriously wrapped in Bernini's Piazza Navona fountain. Not critics
but artists make the canon, which is simply the long stream of
influences that create and sustain a civilization.

We must construct a curriculum that balances the arts and
sciences in a simple, rational way. I have written and spoken ex-
tensively about the need to demolish women's studies, a corrupt

INTRODUCTION

XXIII

autocracy that was flung together without regard for scholarly stan-
dards or objective criteria of professional credentialing. Gay studies
is even worse — a cul-de-sac microfield that guarantees bias and self-
interest. My proposed substitute, sex studies, would put men and
women, as well as gay and straight, into the same program, and it
would make basic study of biology, endocrinology, psychology, and
anthropology requirements for anyone claiming expertise in gender
issues or seeking employment in that area as a college instructor.

Teaching of the arts also needs reform, to remove every trace
of desiccated academicism — bibliographic, semiotic, or poststruc-
turalist. The visual and performing arts must be liberated from the
tyranny of words, the stock-in-trade of a snooty literary establish-
ment whose superannuated worldview predates that of our colorful,
image-dominated age of television. History of the international lan-
guages of music and dance should be built into the liberal arts core
curriculum. It is disgraceful, for example, that jazz is more honored
abroad than in its birthplace. Black music, in its half-dozen major
phases, belongs at the heart of education for all young Americans.

The media so shapes our world that a survey course in its long
development is indispensable, from the first mass-market newspa-
pers in the 1830s through the birth of advertising and the invention
of movies, radio, and television. Art films are a superb educational
tool to introduce students to foreign languages as well as to dramatize
the fleeting ambiguities and hypnotic compulsions of sexuality. Cin-
ema is far more accurate about sex than is feminist theory. Public
funds should be used not to support individual artists — no genuinely
avant-garde artist would take money from the government — but to
underwrite dance companies, musical groups, and a national film
consortium, designated to produce and protect mint-condition prints
of great films for constant circulation among primary and secondary
schools. If we fail to take action to sophisticate our students, the
intellectual and artistic creativity of America will suffer.

All the pieces in Vamps and Tramps were written in the two
years since the release of Sex, Art, and American Culture. Many have
been previously published in England and America, but the fol-
lowing were specially written for this volume: the main essay,

XXIV

INTRODUCTION

"No Law in the Arena," "The Saint," "Tournament of Modern Per-
sonae" (on D.H. Lawrence), "Sontag, Bloody Sontag," and "My
Brothers in Crime," a memoir of four gay men who have heavily
influenced me.

This is a multimedia book, in the Sixties style of Marshall
McLuhan. Included are transcripts of several of the television and
film projects I have recently participated in. I feel most fortunate
to have an ongoing professional relationship with the brilliant
producer-director Peter Stuart, whose staff and crew at Rapido TV
in London have created four specials that I hosted on Channel 4,
thanks to arts editor Waldemar Januszczak, over the past year and
a half. Two of them, The Penis Unsheathed and Lolita Unclothed, are in
this book. Censorship is such in America, on both the left and right
wings, that neither program could have been made for mainstream
television here. Transcripts of the two remaining shows, Diana Un-
clothed (which caused a press flap) and Lesbians Unclothed, were not
included for reasons of space.

Other transcripts, in order of their film production: "Dr. Pag-
lia," from Female Misbehavior, directed by Monika Treut and featur-
ing Bruce Benderson; Sex War, directed by Luca Babini and starring
Lauren Hutton; and Glennda and Camille Do Downtown, a video col-
laboration with New York drag queen and public-access television
personality and producer Glennda Orgasm (Glenn Belverio). The
Hutton film has not yet been publicly shown, but Female Misbehavior
has appeared at film festivals and in commercial release around the
world and is distributed in video by First Run Features. Glennda and
Camille, despite being shown at the prestigious Sundance Festival in
January 1994, was banned for reasons of political incorrectness this
past spring by both the New York and San Francisco Lesbian and
Gay Film Festivals. [Note: As this book went to press, Glennda and
Camille won first prize for the best short documentary at the 1994
Chicago Underground Film Festival.]

Other pieces in the book deal with censorship, academic reform,
and the Stalinism of the feminist and gay-activist establishment.
There are articles on Diana and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as
well as on the Clintons (including a 1993 London cover story on
Hillary). Popular culture figures profiled include Judy Garland,
Woody Allen, Amy Fisher, Sandra Bernhard, Madonna, and Barbra

INTRODUCTION

XXV

Streisand (another 1993 London cover story). Literary and artistic
subjects, aside from D.H. Lawrence and Susan Sontag, include
Lewis Carroll, Bizet's Carmen, Kenneth Clark's The Nude, an article
on love poetry from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and
a manifesto of Neo-Sexism, the pro-art project I cofounded with
artist and curator Alison Maddex. Among books reviewed are those
by Germaine Greer, Edward Said, and Warren Farrell. Previously
published pieces have usually been retitled, and all material dropped
for space at deadline editing has been restored.

"Satires and Short Takes" includes heterogeneous extracts and
snippets, as well as the advice columns I wrote for Spy, which came
to an end when commissioning editor Jamie Malanowski left the
magazine. Scores of cartoons about me have appeared since my last
book; some are reproduced here. They illustrate the degree to which
I have become a sexual persona, apart from my ideas, at a moment
when both feminism and academe are in flux. I seem to have passed
into Pop Art, one of the formative influences of my college years.
Last is a condensed media chronicle of my major appearances, as
both subject and vamping commentator, in international newspapers
and magazines.

I would like to thank my patient and supportive editor, LuAnn
Walther, and my ace publicist and loyal advisor, Katharine Barrett,
at Vintage Books. Luca Babini, artist and athlete, has been extraor-
dinarily generous in taking portrait photographs of me for this book.
Five people were directly involved, in different ways, with the pro-
duction of the manuscript: Kent Christensen, Nina Lucas, Stephen
Wolf, Bruce Benderson, and my partner, Alison Maddex. During
the writing of the book, I benefited from conversations with the
following people, in alphabetical order: Glenn Belverio, Robert
Caserio, John DeWitt, Herbert Golder, Lauren Hutton, Ann Jami-
son, Stephen Jarratt, Elizabeth Kaspar Aldrich, Kristen Lippin-
cott, M.G. Lord, Kenneth Manning, Harvey Mansfield, Rosemary
Mayer, Lynn Nesbit, Lenora Paglia, Marilyn Roberts, Gillian Rose,
Camelia Sanes, Heidi Jon Schmidt, Christina Hoff Sommers, Fran-
cesca Stanfill, Sarah Such, David Talbot, Monika Treut, Helen and
Gregory Vermeychuk, Lydia Wills, and Ben and Rachel Wizner.

Camille Paglia
Philadelphia, June 1994

THE YEAR
OF THE PENIS

THE PENIS UNSHEATHED

After hours at a museum gallery of Greek and Roman sculpture. Next to a
stately entryway of Doric pillars, we see a marble copy of Polycleitus' Dia-
doumenos, a nude athlete tying on his headband. The camera pans down his
body, from face to penis. To the brassy beat of Yma Sumac's (C Goomba
Boomba, " a charwoman with mop and pail sashays through the gallery and
flicks the statue's genitals with three flourishes of her orange dust rag. Cut to
stage set adorned with racks of church candles and a red carpet leading to an
altar-like platform, above which hangs a neon-bright Pop Art painting of the
abdomen and thighs of Michelangelo's David. The background of the image
is iridescent orange, the skin cobalt blue, the pubic hair green, and the penis
hot-pink. CAMILLE PAGLIAj in black jacket and pants, strolls out from the
shadow of a church window, steps up on the platform, and addresses the camera.

CAMILLE PAGLIA (imitating Nancy Kulp as schoolmarmish Miss fane on
The Beverly Hillbillies): The penis. Should we keep it? Or
should we cut it off and throw it away? In the thirty years since
the sexual revolution, we have thought obsessively about sex
but come to no answers to any important sexual question. The

[A Rapido TV production for World Without Walls, Channel 4, London. Pro-
duced by Peter Stuart. Directed by Peter Murphy. Aired March 1, 1994.]

4

VAMPS & TRAMPS

penis is shaping up to be the central metaphor of the gender
crisis of the Nineties. ( Cut to black-and-white art photograph of a nude
man holding a photo of the genitals of Michelangelo's David over his
own.) In too much feminist thought of the last several decades,
the penis has been defined as an instrument of intimidation,
aggression, violation, and destruction. I think we've gotten to
the point where this kind of reductive definition of male anatomy
is proving unsatisfactory to women of the Nineties. It would be
useful for us to go backwards in time and to review the way the
penis has been symbolized through history.

( Cut to prehistoric and classical depictions of men, penises, and dildos, including
Greek vases and the monumental penis-on-a-pillar in the sacred precinct at
Delos. Cut to art historian PETER WEBB, seated against a black background
with a spotlit statue of a nude Greek boy behind him.)

PETER WEBB: The phallus has had a very positive image, a very
positive power in history and in prehistory, as far back as we
go. And this has not in any way been demonstrably anti-women.
But it has been pro. It's been pro-fertility. It's been a sort of
talismanic image, an image to bring fertility, an image to assure
good luck, an image to ward off the evil eye. And in this way,
it's had a strong role to play in all sorts of cultures that we can
examine in history. Really, from prehistoric times right through.
But I suppose the most interesting to evaluate is the world of
Greece and Rome, where it's quite clear that the phallus played
a vital role in worship.

(Cut to a reconstruction oj a priapic dance , circa 300 A. D. } from Derek Jarman's
Sebastiane. Ecstatically leaping acolytes with large phallic prostheses circle
a writhing bald man in white body paint and red G-string, who obscenely laps
his reddened tongue. Back to Paglia on the set.)

PAGLIA: The Greeks had a rather comical little god named Priapus,
who stood for phallic erection. There was a priapic element to
the behavior of Aristophanes' comic actors on stage, some of
whom had enormous leather penises attached to their bodies,
with which they would hit each other (she demonstrates) and buffet
each other about. It's very similar to the "slapstick" of corn-
media dell'arte and, later, vaudeville.

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS 5

( Cut to more Greek vases and then the wild dance again. Cut to art critic Jack
Fritscher, sitting in a park near a monumental fountain.)

JACK FRITSCHER: In art history, it's very difficult to find a favorite
penis without going back to ancient times, where there are very
frankly portrayed beautiful penises. We get into this period of
Western culture where there's a terrible fear of penises. They're
not allowed to be, I think, big, above a larger size than small.
They just don't become the man, and as a result, they don't
have a lot of appeal.

(The camera zooms in on the tiny penises of statues of a discus-thrower and a
warrior with his shield. Return of the Latin beat.)

PAGLIA (on set): The Greeks gave their statues the genitals of small
boy's. We have only recently found out what the reasons for this
might be. It is that the classical Athenians regarded the large
penis as a symbol of animality, of one's bestial instinct having
primacy over the mind. Therefore, it was an exact reversal of
modern days, where a large penis is prized.

( Cut to covers and advertisements from pornography magazines with headlines
like Massive Meat and Big Men on Campus. Fade-in to a muscular
Archaic Greek kouros figure. Back to Peter Webb.)

WEBB: I don't personally think they were deliberately made tiny. I
think that we tend to think that because phalluses are large in
the religious sphere, they look much smaller on human beings.
I don't think there was a specific desire to make them tiny. Some
people say that Michelangelo deliberately made the penises tiny
in the Sistine Chapel. Personally, I don't think that that was
deliberate, though, on his part. (Cut to penis-to-face pan of Mi-
chelangelo 's Adam, accompanied by Gregorian chant of the Kyrie Eleison.)
I think that he just saw that the human body was a perfect
whole and he wanted to make it beautiful without drawing
attention in particular to the sexual aspect.

(Cut to Michelangelo's Sistine fresco of the serpent's temptation of Eve and
the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Cut to shots of
various Sistine ignudi.J

6

VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAG LI A (on set): Perhaps the best example in Michelangelo of the
disparity between the little boy's private parts and the bulky
bravvniness of the adult body would be the ignudi of the Sistine
Chapel ceiling, the nude youths, where you have such a contrast
between the beefiness of the torso and these tiny little genitals
that have always reminded me of my grandmother's gnocchi, tiny
little pasta pieces made out of potatoes. (Mandolin music. Cut to
bowl of fat, white gnocchi, which dissolve into an ignudo'j penis.)

There is a tradition in Renaissance art of depicting the gen-
itals either of the baby Jesus exposed, in ritual display, or of
those of the dead Christ, bulging through the fabric of his loin-
cloth, that seems very shocking to us in modern times. (Cut to
paintings of the passion and entombment of Christ.) There is a sym-
bolism here that Christ was incarnated. He was the Son of God,
but he was put into mortal flesh and experienced, presumably,
all of the impulses and temptations that we too are subject to.

(Cut to MARGARET WALTERS, author 0/The Nude Male. She is seated
in an artist's studio , filled with drawings of the male nude.)

MARGARET WALTERS: The baby Christ often has a very obvious
penis. Sometimes he is touching it; sometimes Mary is pointing
to it. ( Cut to painting of Madonna and child. Mary seems to be gazing
down at her son's penis.) It's always visible. In some sense, a center,
a proof of Christ's humanity as well as his godliness. But also
in dead Christs — I mean, Mantegna's dead Christ, with its
extraordinary foreshortening of the body — the loincloth actually
emphasizes the bulge of his penis, and it's done very reverently.
(Cut to the Mantegna painting.) This is an important point about
humanity and godhead.

( Cut to an art class , where male and female students are sketching a
nude male model with his arms over a pole resting, lancelike, across his
upper back. The camera pans over several charcoal renderings of the penis.)
The male nude has always been central to artistic training,
because it was such a central image in figurative art. It kept
that centrality until we moved into the mid-nineteenth century
and the twentieth century, when figurative art was no longer so
crucial. It's also interesting that the male nude was not available
for women artists to study. They were absolutely excluded. It

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

"7

was an absurd situation. And the great American painter
Thomas Eakins lost his job teaching in Philadelphia when he
removed the loincloth from a male model — this is in the late
nineteenth century! — interestingly, probably because some of
his women students complained. They were at that stage gen-
uinely shocked by this. It seemed to be sexual rather than ar-
tistic.

(Cut to SARAH KENT, art critic and author o/Women's Images of Men.
She is standing in front of a display of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs.)

SARAH KENT: Women have only very recently begun to make images
of the male nude, and they're doing a lot of things that men
find problematic. For instance, making fun of them or else show-
ing them as vulnerable, soft and passive, in a way that appeals
to them but in a way that men find very problematic.

(Cut to excerpts from a film, Dick: Women's Views on the Penis. A
question appears on screen: (( What do they look like?" A series of American
and British female voices is heard over a montage of black-and-white close-up
photos of real-life penises. The women's tones vary, from affectionate to bitterly
sarcastic.)

It's kind of like a vacuum-cleaner hose or something (laughs).
It's such a (baby talk) cute little thingl
I think it looks sort of bald.
Kind of heart-shaped.

Almost like a duck-billed platypus, I suppose.

A cluster of bananas.

It looked like a tea kettle.

A butt.

I always thought it looked like a belly button.
A little bit like a skinned chicken neck.
They're like young asparaguses!

8

VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: Throughout history, respectable women were expected to
keep a modest gaze. That is, not stare, to keep their eyes cast
downward. A woman with a very hard or what was called "free"
gaze was always considered a prostitute. So here we are at the
end of the twentieth century now, and respectable, middle-class
women are — through the tutelage of modern commercial pho-
tography — being taught how to take pleasure in looking. Now,
I think that this is a true revolution, and it is the end of that
feminist idea of the "male gaze," which says that men stare
aggressively and turn women into sex objects, because now we're
in a period when it is permissible for women to make men into
sex objects.

( Cut to the "Women Photograph Men Workshop, 33 a photography course de-
signed for women to study the male nude, offered by Exposures Gallery in
London. Three young women giggle and sheepishly exchange glances as, cameras
held aloft, they kneel in front of or lie below the nude model 3 s penis and buttocks.
The gung-ho female instructor, like a summer-camp counselor, cheerfully exhorts
them onward.)

INSTRUCTOR (motioning with her arms): Move in closer!

SARAH KENT: A lot of supposedly erotic male nudes are very funny
because there's such hysteria in the image, you know, there's this
terrible sense of, "Oh, my God! We've got to try to build up
the mythology of this creature!" And it doesn't work because
it's ludicrously inflated, in every sense of the word. It's incredibly
difficult to look at an image of the penis for lots and lots of
different reasons for men and for women. The man will probably
have to identify with that subject and feel very uncomfortable,
feel very vulnerable because he's been stripped of his accoutre-
ments. He's been stripped of his covering.

(Cut to male and female visitors 3 bemused faces at "True Phallacy: The Myth
of Male Power, 33 America's first group art show since the Sixties devoted to
imagery of the penis. On view from December 10, 1993, to fanuary 19, 1994,
at Clark & Company gallery, Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Among the
works visible are Jeffrey Barron's Race Relations (black and white plastic
dildos encased, mummylike, in velvet boxes), Groover Cleveland's Ce n'est
pas un penis, Reuven Kupperman's nude, cross-legged Self-portrait, a paint-

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

9

ingfrom Joe Kaminski's Dick Series (a gigantic swollen penis with a cock
ring), and Nuki's Untitled (a penis head peeking out of a matador costume).
Cut to artist JOSE VILLARRUBIA, standing in front of his Minotaur, a
ritualistically frontal photograph of a nude black man who is wearing a silver
bull mask and whose large penis has been painted silver.)

JOSE VILLARRUBIA: The penis is a tremendous, tremendous taboo.
People think that they're going to burn in hell if they see one.
You never see it on television or in the media. And it's restricted
only to pornography — and (laughs) fine art.

( Cut to ALISON MADDEX, curator ofTrut Phallacy. She is serenely seated
behind a table covered with 60 shiny, gun-metal-gray erect penises pointing at
different angles toward the ceiling. It is Jim Fotile's Die Tannenwald: Self-
portrait. The artist plaster-casted his own penis and coated the images with
metallic paint.)

ALISON MADDEX: Artists can deal with it. In a situation like this
penis "forest" here, where these take on figurative kind of char-
acters. Even more so than trees, I would say they're people some-
how — kind of (laughs and gestures like a hiker plowing through
underbrush) making our way through the dicks of the world!

( Cut to a chic blonde woman at True Phallacy, viewing the penis "forest. "
As the crowd looks on, she dramatically points out her favorite.)

WOMAN VISITOR: I'll take that one! (laughs uproariously with her female
friend)

( Cut back to England.)

SARAH KENT: If we come to the female viewer, what's she doing when
she looks at the penis? Well, she's probably embarrassed, to
start with. She looks at this little piece of flesh, and she thinks,
"That's no use to me. What can I do with that? Nothing!" So
this man is of no use to her in any metaphoric or literal way.
Of course, the main problem is that it's illegal to show an erec-
tion. An erect penis is a very handsome object, / maintain, a
very beautiful object, as people like Robert Mapplethorpe have
proved. You know, he has shown some wonderful male nudes with
semi-erect penises. And in pornography magazines the men usu-

VAMPS & TRAM PS

ally have slightly massaged members, so that they appear to be
a bit erect, which helps a lot, because then you're getting nearer
to something that could actually be meaningful and useful and
could embody power.

(Cut to HELEN WILLIAMS, editor of For Women magazine, who peers
through a magnifying glass at a proof sheet of color photos of a long-haired,
nude, heavily tanned and oiled hunk impishly kneeling with a metal baseball
bat. Montage of For Women covers. Headlines on a Patrick Swayze cover:
"I imagine my cock is encased in an icicle 33 ; "Is it love or lust? and how to
tell the difference 33 ; "Group Sex 33 ; "Miss Whiplash and the cabinet minister. 33
Headlines on a Matt Dillon cover: "Is your clitoris V" long? 33 ; "Women who
sleep with strangers night after night. 33 )

HELEN WILLIAMS: Women definitely do want to see an erection. We
get a lot of letters from women saying, you know, "Love the
magazine, but how come there aren't any erections?" Because
it doesn't make any sense to have kind of sexy shots of men
without an erection. Because the guidelines are so woolly about
what actually constitutes an erection. I mean, there is no angle
or degree that we're given. The law is very vague on this. You
know, we've tried kind of seeing how far we can go and what
the censors consider an erection. And basically, we've finally
decided that a penis that is kind of self-supporting, or free-
standing in any way, if it's not leaning on something or
just . . . hanging, then we get into problems. And especially it
mustn't be pointing at you!

(Flash of the baseball boy 3 s cock. Then back to PAGLIA on set, her head next
to Davids hot-pink penis.)

PAGLIA: For me, the erect penis is the ultimate symbol of human
sexual desire, because only men can show sexual excitation ex-
ternally. We never know whether women are truly sexually aroused
or not. Their reproductive apparatus remains internal. There-
fore, I think it is of crucial importance to feminism to put the
penis back to stage center!

( Cut to bronze figurine of dancing Greek satyr with a huge, curved erection.)

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

JACK FRITSCHER: It seems ironic that here we're doing a show about
the penis and we cannot show the erect penis. We can, however,
show the penis that pees but not the penis that gives babies or
grace.

(Cut to tourists crowded around the Mannekin-Pis, the seventeenth-century
"pissing boy" fountain in Brussels. They leap back, laughing, as the spray
hits them.)

PAGLIA: The motif of the pissing boy that is so common on fountains
in Europe seems very remarkable, because one can't imagine a
female equivalent. A young girl pissing would not in any way
be humorous or touching. Young boys are literally handling their
tools from early on. (She demonstrates.) They have to learn how
to, for example, aim. I have often said that this is one of the
moments when young boys learn linearity, concentration, focus,
projection. (Cut to rococo painting of a pastoral scene of nymphs and
cherubs, two of whom are urinating into a brook.) Right from the start,
man has the idea of building, of something which is building and
falling, okay? The idea of something that goes both hard and
soft, that he is not totally in control of. So I think that the phallic
paradigm underlies a lot of male cultural achievement in ways
that women too easily ridicule.

(Cut to a panorama of Manhattan's skyline. The camera pulls back to reveal
a pensive, nude young man leaning languidly against a wall on a roof, with
the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in the distance. In the next photo, the
same man, clad only in sneakers and athletic socks, lounges on a Hudson River
pier, as he contemplates the World Trade Center towers.)

SARAH KENT: You could argue that we live in a phallic environment.
I mean, if you go to Manhattan, it's just one prick after another!
The entire place is a kind of temple to the phallus. And of course,
the power of the phallus, in terms of commerce and money. We
see monuments everywhere that are basically large pricks: Cleo-
patra's Needle, Nelson's Column. So we don't have actual pricks
on display, but we have phallic objects on display. I can't imag-
ine a woman building a building that was tower-blocked in
shape. It's inconceivable.

12 VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAG LI A (on set): One of Freud's most controversial theories is that
of penis envy. That is, that woman feels a mutilated being, feels
that she is an incomplete man. This has always been disputed
by feminists. And indeed, it's probably the number-one reason
Freud was thrown out of the feminist movement twenty years
ago. It still remains controversial.

( Cut again to Dick: Women's Views on the Penis. The question 'Would
you want one?" appears on screen. More black-and-white photos of penises
flash by, while we hear women y s responses, some of them heavily ironic.)

Where would I keep it?

Maybe. Maybe if I had it in a little box — I mean, that I
could take out and play with. But never connected to my body!

It looks like you'd get a backache. I mean, God! No thanks!

Besides, I've kicked enough guys in the dick, and seen the
reaction that it gets, to not want that kind of pain.

But I've always wished that I could sort of lease one and
have it around whenever I need it.

Like "Queen for a Day." I'd like to have a penis for a day.

If I had a dick, I think I'd probably piss on everything and,
uh, I'd wank a lot.

I'd play with it by myself a lot. And I'd go around and stick
it in as many women as I could, and I would just totally enjoy
it all the time.

paglia (as lofty Dame Edna Everage): I myself, though I would find
a penis useful when courting women, would think of it on a day-
to-day basis as being highly inconvenient, getting in the way,
always being rubbed and therefore a constant problem/

OFFSCREEN VOICE (director PETER MURPHY,): But supposing you
could have a penis just for a day, Camille. What would you do
with it?

PAGLIA: (Taken by surprise, goes blank for a moment. Then laughs, blushes,
and shrugs.) You don't want me to answer that question! I

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS

would — (imitates Groucho Marx) go find Catherine Deneuve in a
hurry!

( Cut to film of annual Shinto fertility procession at Tagata Shrine in Japan.
A boisterous team of men in traditional garb carry a giant blonde-wood phallus,
the size of a tree trunk, on their shoulders through the village to the temple.
Rows of women follow, cradling replicas like babies. A monk sprinkles coarse
salt in the street. A young woman rings a penis-shaped bell. Businessmen rub
the tip of a black stone phallus, for good luck. A woman bows and prays to
an altar of phallic images.)

JACK FRITSCHER: I'm not saying that you just worship the penis.
It's just that we're talking about penis, and penis as being some-
thing that hasn't been worshipped. Everybody's falling on their
knees and worshipping vaginas — in a sense, worshipping fem-
ininity. I mean, people just driven into groups because they want
to get in touch with their feminine side. Well, hey! Get in touch
with your masculine side. You need to get a grip on your dick!
Hold on to it. Because if you don't, it will be turned into a
Bobbitt!

(Cut to cover of People magazine: "The War of the Bobbitts: The Cut Felt
Round the World. 33 Horror-movie music. Close-ups of Lorena and John Wayne
Bobbitt in court and then the kitchen knife itself, placed in evidence.)

PAGLIA (on set): I think that the subliminal castration anxiety that
men have always had has suddenly erupted into the open with
the case in 1993 of Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband's
penis in the middle of the night. I think this is an event of major
proportions in modern sexual history. I don't feel that most
women want to support such an act of barbarism. But in some
sense, Lorena Bobbitt has committed the ultimate revolutionary
act of contemporary feminism.

( Cut to footage of Lorena Bobbitt walking from her car into the courthouse.
Cut to Court TV cable coverage.)

ANCHORWOMAN: We turn now today to the trial of Lorena Bobbitt,
accused, as most of the country now knows, of cutting off her
husband's penis. After the opening statements in this case, which
were quite brief by most standards, John Wayne Bobbitt himself

14 VAMPS & TRAMPS

was called to the stand as witness number one for the state.
Here he describes what it was like when his wife attacked him.

(Cut to courtroom footage.)

JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT: And she just pulled up on my, you know,
groin area. I mean . . . (His voice trails off.)

STATE'S ATTORNEY: She did what?

JOHN: She pulled on my groin area twice, I think. I felt a couple
jerks and then I, I, I — After that she just, like, cut it off.

( Cut to Lorena Bobbitt on the stand.)

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: And the next thing you remember is when you
were driving to your friend Janice's house —

LORENA BOBBITT (distraught): Yes. Yes.

ATTORNEY: You were getting close to a stop sign —

lorena: Yes.

ATTORNEY: And you realized that there was something in your left
hand —

lorena: Yes.

ATTORNEY: And you realized it was your husband's penis —
LORENA (whimpering): Yes.

ATTORNEY: And you were just horrified. Isn't that right?
lorena: Yes.

ATTORNEY: And you just wanted to get rid of it. Isn't that right?

LORENA (sobbing but mysteriously dry-eyed): Yes, yes, yes.

ATTORNEY: And you went and got rid of it. Just like that. Isn't that
right?

lorena: Yes, I throw it out! Yes!
ATTORNEY: Just like that.

THE YEAR OF THE PENIS 15

LORENA: No, I don't remember how I threw it just like that. I know
I just — I just want to get rid of it!

(Lorena gropes for a handkerchief buries her face in it, and works herself up
into wracking sobs.)

JACK FRITSCHER: I think what we have is a society that's been so
frightened by the penis, made frightened by a version of the
woman's movement, not by feminism itself, but by an hysterical
woman's movement that has so frightened people about the
penis, that you have Lorena Bobbitt being applauded for chop-
ping off the aptly named John Wayne Bobbitt's penis in his
bedroom. (Cut to Lorena leaving the courthouse after her acquittal. She
is clutching a huge white teddy bear. A turbaned African-American woman,
balancing a box of long-stemmed red roses, leads her forcefully by the arm.
There are deafening cheers and chants from the crowd: "Lorenal Lorena!
Lorena!") If people think of the penis as an instrument of rape,
then what message are they giving to their sons? What they're
going to do is create a whole generation of men who are so afraid
of their penis, they're not going to be able to use it for the
procreation of the race. Because the self-esteem that people like
to talk about is being taken away.

SARAH KENT: Virility has taken some hard knocks recently. And
men feel very frightened of their own sexuality, because their
sexual urges seem to be politically incorrect, if you like. Women
have begun to think of men as aggressors and predators rather
than as companions. (Cut to photo of a nude youth in heroic profile,
gazing up at the sun.) And I think we're now moving on to a new
phase in which both men and women are beginning to say, well,
you know, "We want sexually active men. We want sexual part-
ners. But let's rethink what virility is. Let's rethink what it means
for the woman."

(Cut to photo of a nude young man cuddling a nude male infant. Then photos
of penises juxtaposed with flowers, leaves, a mask, and donut-like baby's toys.
Back to the opening pan of the Greek Diadoumenos, from head to penis.)

PAGLIA: I have intensely disliked the tendency of many feminists to
want men to be remade in a kind of shy, sensitive form — to

1 6

VAMPS & TRAMPS

become, in essence, new kinds of women, contemporary eunuchs
with a soft penis, which is less inconvenient to women. I think
that this is not in the interests of the human race. We want a
hard penis. We want masculine vigor. And I'm afraid that in order
to get men macho again, we may have to endure a certain
amount of instability in sexual relations. That is, there may have
to be a kind of honorable truce between enemy camps.

So what would be my advice to the sexes at the end of the
century? (arms akimbo in fierce, campy drag queen mode) I would say
to men: get it up! And to women I would say: deal with it!

(Camera pulls in tight on David 's hot-pink penis. Back to Diadoumenos
standing guard amid the white pillars at the museum. As Yma Sumac's Latin
beat returns, the credits roll.)

NO LAW IN THE
ARENA

NO LAW IN THE ARENA:
A PAGAN THEORY
OF SEXUALITY

1. introduction: the horses of passion

At the end of the Christian millennium and the century of Freud,
sex is still shrouded in mystery. A question mark hangs over every
important sexual issue. Despite bitter public controversy and heated
private debate, we have no answers. Indeed, we have barely begun
to formulate the questions accurately.

Sex, I have argued in my prior books, is animality and artifice,
a dynamic interplay of nature and culture. To study it, one must
weigh the testimony of art and draw on all the scholarly resources
of the social and natural sciences. In my opinion, the many schools
of modern psychology, whose roots were in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, reached their height in the eclectic 1960s, which fused widely
diverse theories and practices, from Freudian verbal analysis to Rei-
chian body manipulation. In that decade in America, Western sci-
ence and Asian Hinduism momentarily came together, but the
brilliant insights gained from this encounter were experienced by
isolated individuals and dissipated into the general culture. The
psychedelic Sixties left their imprint in images and music more than
in books.

For the last twenty-five years, sex theory has been in a state of

20

VAMPS & TRAMPS

chaos. Single-issue activism turned into fanaticism, on both the left
and right. Understanding of eroticism has actually regressed, as
ideology has become paramount. The major conceptual break-
through of the Sixties was its Romantic movement back toward
nature, the awesome, star-studded panorama dwarfing social con-
ventions and forms. The Sixties flower-power view of nature had
too much Rousscauist benevolence, but it was more right than
wrong. Organicism is the true deconstruction. With the failure or
reluctance of Sixties visionaries to enter the professions or main-
stream politics, the Seventies suffered from an intellectual vacuum,
which was filled by a narrow, blinkered social constructionism — the
simplistic behaviorist belief that nature does not exist, that every-
thing we are comes from social conditioning.

Social constructionism was a crude distortion of the vast Sixties
cosmic vision. It was promulgated for sectarian political purposes
by three groups. First, the new Seventies breed of Stalinist feminist
tried, in the abortion crusade, to wipe out all reference to nature
or religion — a misconceived strategy that backfired and simply
strengthened the pro-life opposition. Second, ambitious literature
academics, ignorant of science, used esoteric, language-based, social
constructionist French theory to advance their careers after the col-
lapse of the academic job market in the Seventies recession. Third,
gay activists, after the identification of AIDS in the early Eighties,
used fascist tactics to stop public discussion of it in anything but
political terms — as if disease occurred in people's prejudices rather
than in the suffering body.

But what AIDS shows us is nature itself, risen up with terrible
force to mock our delusions of knowledge and control. AIDS, above
all, forces nature back onto the agenda of sex theory. Unfortunately
for the shallow ideology of current feminism and gay liberation,
whose ultimate aims I support, this means that procreation must
be dealt with much more fully and honestly than has yet been done.
The avoidance of that issue by the left has simply ceded it to and
helped the rise of the right, which frames the argument in moral or
rather Judeo-Christian terms.

For me, the ultimate power in the universe is nature, not God,
whose existence I can understand only as depersonalized vital en-
ergy. But as I have repeatedly said, merely because nature is supreme

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

21

does not mean we must yield to it. I take the Late Romantic view
that everything great in human history has been achieved in defiance
of nature. Law, art, and technology are defense mechanisms, Apol-
lonian lines drawn against the Dionysian turbulence of nature. Mel-
ville's Captain Ahab, crippled and scarred, shaking his fist at the
stormy heavens, symbolizes the rebellion of imagination against fate.

There is a sex problem in the West because of Judeo-
Christianity's ambivalence toward nature, the fallen realm of matter
brought into being by a perfect transcendent deity. From its first
book on, the Bible links sex to reproduction and condemns as per-
verted all male sexual activities, such as sodomy or onanism, that
are wasteful of semen. Recent claims by gay activists that there is
no explicit prohibition of homosexuality in the Old Testament, or
that it is simply one of many defunct ritual formulas, or that "God
is love" (which applies primarily to the New Testament and only
to agape and caritas, not eros), beg the question in a foolish and reckless
manner. Procreation, not fear or bias, underlies the Christian op-
position to homosexuality.

Fundamentalist reading of the Bible is far from passe. On the
contrary, religious faith, in particular evangelical Protestantism and
Roman Catholicism, is spreading around the world. The goals and
reputation of progressive politics have been harmed by the juvenile
arrogance of the liberal establishment toward institutional religion,
which may oppress by rules but which is also a repository of spiritual
experience, as well as folk wisdom about life, far more truthful than
anything in French poststructuralism. What I propose is an argu-
ment based on another Western tradition, the Greco-Roman or
pagan, which was equal to the Judeo-Christian in the formation of
our culture.

Feminists and gay activists must stop their self-destructive habit
of jeering at the church and trying to twist it to their own purposes.
We must concentrate instead on winning recognition of the pagan
line as a countertradition whose major contributions have been sci-
ence and art and whose philosophy of sexuality is both broader and
subtler than the Judeo-Christian. It is to Athens and Rome that we
also trace our political systems. The framers of American democracy
were not conventional Christians but Enlightenment Deists who
invoked a crosscultural "Creator." It is no coincidence that the

22

VAMPS & TRAMPS

principal monumental architecture of our national capital is pagan.

Even in classical antiquity, homosexuality was controversial,
and despite the exaggerated claims of today's partisans, there was
no period or place where it flourished in complete freedom from
moral opprobrium. However, the urban centers of the ancient Med-
iterranean were magnets for prostitution, as well as male homosex-
uality. Indeed, in my view, development of a sexual underworld may
be intrinsic to urbanization as a worldwide phenomenon, a process
that can be checked only by ruthless repression by church or state.
There are remarkably similar patterns in erotic behavior, as identity
overlaps identity in the intensified space and pace of cities.

Whether rampant open homosexuality is or is not a symptom
of social decadence remains one of the issues that must be fairly
discussed, without hysterical charges of "homophobia/' in the new
age of sex theory. I am ready to defend both homosexuality and
decadence, since I look at history from the perspective of art, not
morality. For me, civilization is art, and art is the highest record of
humanity. One day, when we represent ourselves to inhabitants of
distant galaxies, it will be by our art that we will want to be known.
Therefore, anything that contributes to art must be nurtured and
preserved. What seems irrefutable from my studies is that male
homosexuality is intricately intertwined with art, for reasons we have
yet to determine.

The Greeks invented not only the major genres of literature
and the disciplines of philosophy but organized athletics, in their
mathematics-based track and field form. Dramatic competition is
built into the agonistic plot structure of Greek tragedy as well as
the oratorical Western mode of legal argumentation. I want to trans-
fer that rhythmic choreography of opposition into sex theory. Late-
twentieth-century America has more in common with imperial Rome
than with classical Athens, and so it is to the Hellenized Roman
world that I would look for pagan models. We need new living myths.

The current discourse about sex is too genteel. Freud's severe,
conflict-based system has lost popularity to a casual, sentimental
style of user-friendly psychological counseling that I find typically
Protestant, in the glad-handing Chamber of Commerce way. The
operatic perversions of Krafft-Ebing and the unsettling daemonism
of Ferenczi are completely gone. Yet sex war remains, and is likely

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

23

to be our permanent condition. Competition and conflict are oper-
ating at every level of even our cooperative ventures, at work or at
home. Our dream life itself, as Freud has shown, is both power play
and passion play.

In war there can also be honor, the code of aristocratic chivalry,
applied by medieval knights {chevaliers, "horsemen") to battlefield,
court, and bedchamber. If women want freedom and equality, they
must learn the rules of the game. The title of this essay comes from
Ben-Hur (1959), the Hollywood epic that depicts the explosive tension
in Judaea under Roman occupation. An Arab sheik persuades the
vengeful prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) to race his ex-
quisite white horses at Jerusalem by promising a head-to-head show-
down with the evil Roman tribune, Messala (Stephen Boyd). The
sheik says, "There is no law in the arena."

Sex today occurs in the dust and clamor of the imperial circus.
Private grievances are dragged into the glare of day and become
meat for the masses. Plato's lofty metaphor of the charioteer, the
soul subduing by cool rationality the horses of bestial passion, was
brutally revised by Rome, with its grandiose gladiatorial spectacles.
The chaste elegance of the contemplative Delphic Charioteer was
inconceivable in the hurly-burly hippodromes of the Hellenistic
Mediterranean. Under the empire, as we see from the sober writings
of Marcus Aurelius, the philosophic ideal of Stoic detachment be-
came a way to survive cultural instability. Then as now, there is no
going back. Conservative paradigms deserve our respect but also
our recognition that they are nostalgic longings for a simpler and
irretrievable past.

Sex in our age has become gladiatorial, with male and female,
gay and straight whipping and goading each other for position. This
is our lot. We must accept it and devise a simple new rule book and
training regime that puts the combatants on equal footing. Neither
women nor gays should plead for special protections or preferential
treatment. The arena is the social realm, marked off from nature
but ritually formalizing nature's aggressions. My libertarian position
is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot
and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority
figures into sex is totalitarian.

The ultimate law of the sexual arena is personal responsibility

24

VAMPS & TRAMPS

and self-defense. We must be prepared to go it alone, without the
infantilizing assurances of external supports like trauma counselors,
grievance committees, and law courts. I say to women: get down in
the dirt, in the realm of the senses. Fight for your territory, hour by
hour. Take your blows like men. I exalt the pagan personae of athlete
and warrior, who belong to shame rather than guilt culture and
whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance, and valor.

2. sex crime: rape

The area where contemporary feminism has suffered the most
self-inflicted damage is rape. What began as a useful sensitization
of police officers, prosecutors, and judges to the claims of authentic
rape victims turned into a hallucinatory overextension of the defi-
nition of rape to cover every unpleasant or embarrassing sexual
encounter. Rape became the crime of crimes, overshadowing all the
wars, massacres, and disasters of world history. The feminist ob-
session with rape as a symbol of male-female relations is irrational
and delusional. From the perspective of the future, this period in
America will look like a reign of mass psychosis, like that of the
Salem witch trials.

Rape cannot be understood in isolation from general criminol-
ogy, which most feminists have not bothered to study. Psychopa-
thology was an early interest of mine, partly because of my own
aggressive and deviant impulses as a tomboy in the Fifties. Two
comprehensive, analytic, and nonjudgmental books I acquired as a
teenager gave me the intellectual framework for my later approaches
to abnormal behavior: Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sex-
ualis (1886) and Emile Durkheim's Suicide (1897). In college and
graduate school, I gathered the material on rape, homosexuality,
and other controversial themes that appears in Sexual Personae. By
the time Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will appeared in 1975, I
knew enough to find its interpretative framework seriously inade-
quate. That book is one of many well-meaning feminist examples of
the limitation of white middle-class assumptions in understanding
extreme emotional states or acts.

The philistinism of feminist discourse on rape in the Eighties
and Nineties has been astonishing. My generation was well-educated

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

25

in the Sixties in major literary texts that have since been margin-
alized by blundering women's studies: our sense of criminality and
the mystery of motivation came principally from Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment, Camus's The Stranger, and Genet's The Maids. There
was also Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontil-
lado," as well as eerie films like Fritz Lang's M, Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho, and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion (on the Leopold and Loeb
case). The shrill feminist melodrama of male oppressor/ female vic-
tim came straight out of nickelodeon strips of mustache-twirling
villains and squealing maidens tied to train tracks. Those who revere
and live with great art recognize Clytemnestra, Medea, Lady Mac-
beth, and Hedda Gabler — conspirators and death-dealers of im-
placable will — as equally the forebears of modern woman.

Rape should more economically be defined as either stranger
rape or the forcible intrusion of sex into a nonsexual context, such
as a professional situation. However, even the latter is excusable if
a sexual overture is welcomed, as can be the case in both gay and
straight life. There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs en-
couragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-
American world. The fantastic fetishism of rape by mainstream and
anti-porn feminists has in the end trivialized rape, impugned wom-
en's credibility, and reduced the sympathy we should feel for legit-
imate victims of violent sexual assault.

What I call Betty Crocker feminism — a naively optimistic Pol-
lyannaish or Panglossian view of reality — is behind much of this.
Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in
the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely
by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical
"patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities. In
Sexual Personae, I critiqued the sunny Rousseauism running through
the last two hundred years of liberal thinking and offered the dark
tradition of Sade, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud as more truthful
about human perversity. It is more accurate to see primitive egotism
and animality ever-simmering behind social controls — cruel energies
contained and redirected for the greater good — than to predicate
purity and innocence ravaged by corrupt society. Nor does the Fou-
cault view of numb, shapeless sensoriums tyrannically impinged on
by faceless systems of language-based power make any more sense,

26

VAMPS & TRAMPS

in view of daily news reports of concretely applied and concretely
suffered random beatings, mutilations, murders, arson, massacres,
and ethnic exterminations around the world.

Rape will not be understood until we revive the old concept of
the barbaric, the uncivilized. The grotesque cliche t< patriarchy ,>
must go, or rather be returned to its proper original application to
periods like Republican Rome or Victorian England. What feminists
call patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by
men but augmented and now co-owned by women. Like a great
temple, civilization is a gender-neutral structure that all should re-
spect. Feminists who prate of patriarchy are self-exiled in grass huts.

Ideas of civilization and barbarism have become unfashionable
because of their political misuse in the nineteenth century. The West
has neither a monopoly on civilization nor the right or obligation to
impose its culture on others. Nor, as Sexual Personae argues, are any
of us as individuals ever completely civilized. However, it is equally
wrong to dismiss all progressive theories of history, which is not just
scattered bits of data upon which we impose wishful narratives.
Societies do in fact evolve in economic and political complexity.

Even though we no longer wish to call one society "higher" or
"more advanced" than another, it is unwise to equate tribal expe-
rience, with its regimentation by tradition and its suppression of the
individual by the group, with life under industrial capitalism, which
has produced liberalism and feminism. Law and order, which protect
women, children, and the ill and elderly, are a function of hierarchy,
another of the big bad words of feminism. Law and order were
achieved only a century ago in the American West, which still lives
in our national mythology. Disintegration into banditry is always
near at hand, as was shown in 1989 in the notorious case of the
Central Park woman jogger — a savage attack significantly called
"wilding" by its schoolboy perpetrators. Sex crime means back to
nature.

When feminism rejected Freud twenty-five years ago, it edited
out of its mental life the barbarities of the homicidal Oedipal psy-
chodrama, which the annals of crime show is more than a metaphor.
The irony is that Freud's master paradigm of "family romance,"
which structures our adult relationships in love and at work, has a
special appropriateness to the current feminist debate. Too much of

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

27

the date-rape and sexual harassment crisis claimed by white middle-
class women is caused partly by their own mixed signals, which I
have observed with increasing distress as a teacher for over two
decades.

The predominant fact of modern sexual history is not patriarchy
but the collapse of the old extended family into the nuclear family,
an isolated unit that, in its present form, is claustrophobic and
psychologically unstable. The nuclear family can work only in a
pioneer situation, where the punishing physicality of farmwork keeps
everyone occupied and spent from dawn to dusk. The middle-class
nuclear family, where the parents are white-collar professionals who
do brainwork, is seething with frustrations and tensions. Words are
charged, and real authority lies elsewhere, in bosses on the job.
Marooned in the suburbs or in barricaded urban apartments, up-
wardly mobile families are frantically overscheduled and geograph-
ically transient, with few ties to neighbors and little sustained contact
with relatives.

Two parents alone cannot transmit all the wisdom of life to a
child. Clan elders — grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, un-
cles, cousins — performed this function once. Today, poor inner-city
or rural children are more likely to benefit from the old extended
family or from the surrogate family of long-trusted neighbors, since
working-class people are less likely to make repeated moves for job
promotions. The urban child sees the harshness of the street; the
rural child witnesses the frightening operations of nature. Both have
contact with an eternal reality denied the suburban middle-class
child, who is cushioned from risk and fear and who is expected to
conform to a code of genteel good manners and repressed body
language that has changed startlingly little since the Victorian era.

The sex education of white middle-class girls is clearly deficient,
since it produces young women unable to foresee trouble or to survive
sexual misadventure or even raunchy language without crying to
authority figures for help. A sense of privilege and entitlement, as
well as ignorance of the dangers of life, has been institutionalized
by American academe, with its summer-resort, give-the-paying-cus-
tomers-what-they-want mentality. Europe has thus far been rela-
tively impervious to the date-rape hysteria, since its tortured political
history makes sugary social fantasies of the American kind less pos-

28

VAMPS & TRAMPS

sible. Fun-and-fabulous teenage dating is not high on the list of
priorities for nations which, in the lifetime of half their population,
had firsthand knowledge of war, devastation, and economic collapse.
The media-fueled disproportion and distortion of the date-rape de-
bate are partially attributable to American arrogance and parochi-
alism.

White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities
seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have
been sheltered, coddled, and flattered. Having taught at a wide
variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed
that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from finan-
cially struggling families and who must take a patchwork of menial
off-campus jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to
feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and have fewer illusions about
sex. It is affluent, upper-middle-class students who most spout the
party line — as if the grisly hyperemotionalism of feminist jargon
satisfies their hunger for meaningful experience outside their event-
less upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one.

The real turmoil is going on inside the nuclear family, which,
with its caged quarters and cheerful ethic of "togetherness," must
generate invisible barriers to the threat of incest. Here is the real
source of the epidemic eating disorders, blamed by incompetent
feminist analysts on the media. Anorexia, for example, remains pri-
marily a white middle-class phenomenon. The daughter stops her
disturbing sexual maturation by stripping off her female contours,
the hormone-triggered fleshiness of breasts, hips, and buttocks. She
wants to remain a child, when her innocent erotic stratagems had
no consequence. Again and again, among students as well as the
date-rape heroines canonized on television talk shows, I have seen
the flagrant hair-tossing and eye-batting mannerisms of Daddy's
little girl, who since childhood has used flirtation and seductiveness
to win attention within the family.

Provocation and denial are built into the circuitry of the white
middle-class girl, with her depressing flatness of sexual imagination,
her strange combination of "low self-esteem" with hectoring moral
superiority in groups, inflamed by feminist rhetoric. The eating dis-
orders are symptomatic not of external forces or media conspiracies
but of a major breakdown in the female sex role. In the Anglo-

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29

American world, the successful woman is now defined in exclusively
professional terms. The role of mother, still central in Latin and
Asian cultures, has been devalued. Feminism should be about op-
tions. I myself have no talent for motherhood and have sought only
a career. But I recognize that no role may be more important than
bearing and raising children and that most men, whatever their
contributions to the child's later development, are not and will never
be proficient at infant care.

Over the past forty years, there has been an increasingly long
postponement of marriage and childbirth by middle-class women.
For example, my parents married at twenty-one in 1946, a year
before I was born. Today, it would be unheard-of for a girl at an
elite school to marry at that age. Maternity is considered an accident,
a misfortune, the vulgar prerogative of misguided working-class teen-
agers. If a Yale sophomore were to drop out of school to marry, she
would be treated as a traitor to her class, 44 throwing away" her
expensive education, "wasting" her life. In the Sixties, by contrast,
it was considered a radical gesture for a girl to disappoint her parents'
expectations by leaving college and running off with her ragged
hippie boyfriend to bake bread and have babies in a commune.

Modern society is now structured so as to put a crippling im-
pediment between women's physical development and their career
ambitions. Feminist ideology began by claiming to give women free-
dom, enlightenment, and self-determination, but it has ended by
alienating professional women from their own bodies. Every signal
from the body — like the sudden quiet inwardness and psychological
reorientation of girls at puberty, when they mysteriously recede in
classroom assertiveness — is automatically interpreted in terms of
social oppression. Teachers are supposedly "discouraging" the girls;
adjusting your behavior to attract a mate is dismissed as a voluntary
or legitimate choice. Girls are taught the mechanics of reproduction
and sexual intercourse as clinically as if they were learning to operate
a car or computer. The repressed, sanitized style of the WASP man-
agerial class now governs public discussion of sex. Anything dark
or ambiguous is blamed on "ignorance," "superstition," or "lack of
education."

It was after my tumultuous lecture at Brown University in
March 1992 that I saw this process of cultural repression most

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

clearly. Taking questions at the reception, I sat with an African-
American security guard as several hundred students seethed around
me. Those who doubt the existence of political correctness have never
seen the ruthless Red Guards in action, as I have done on campus
after campus. For twenty years, meaningful debate of controversial
issues of sex or race was silenced by overt or covert intimidation.

As I watched a half-dozen pampered, white middle-class girls,
their smooth, plump cheeks contorted with rage, shriek at me about
rape, I had two thoughts. First, America is failing its young women;
these are infantile personalities, emotionally and intellectually un-
developed. Second, it's not rape they're screaming about. Rape is
simply a symbol of the horrors and mysteries of the body, which
their education never deals with or even acknowledges. It was a
Blakean epiphany: I suddenly saw the fear and despair of the lost,
stripped of old beliefs but with nothing solid to replace them. Fem-
inism had constructed a spectral sexual hell that these girls inhab-
ited; it was their entire cultural world, a godless new religion of fury
and fanaticism. Two months later, as I sat in London, discoursing
at length with poised, literate, witty Cambridge University women
of the same age as those at Brown, I became even more indignant
at the travesty of Ivy League education.

Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient
mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is
more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female
sexuality. Science is far from untangling women's intricate hormonal
system, which is dauntingly intertwined with the emotions. Women
live with unpredictability. Reproduction remains a monumental
challenge to our understanding. The Eleusinian Mysteries, with their
secret, torch-lit night rituals, represented woman's grandeur on the
scale that she deserves. We must return to pagan truths.

The elite schools, defining women students only as "future lead-
ers," masters of the social realm, limit and stunt them. The mission
of feminism is to seek the full political and legal equality of women
with men. There should be no impediments to women's social ad-
vance. But it is the first lesson of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judeo-
Christianity that we are much greater than our social selves. I
envision two spheres: one is social, the other sexual and emotional.
Perhaps one-third of each sphere overlaps the other; this is the area

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31

where feminism has correctly said, "The personal is political." But
there is vastly more to the human story. Man has traditionally ruled
the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his
power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there
she has no rival. Victim ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks
women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most
important realm.

Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress
every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda imposed
on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that
document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to
dismiss as "misogynous." In other words, their minds are being
programmed to secede from their bodies — exactly the opposite of
what the Sixties sexual and cultural revolution was all about. There
is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex
lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum
of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men. In contrast, Hol-
lywood actresses, used to expressing emotional truths, are always
reappearing after pregnancy to proclaim, "I'm not important. My
child is important." The most recent was Kelly McGillis, who said,
"Motherhood has changed me. I'm not as ambitious as I used to
be." It is nature, not patriarchal society, that puts motherhood and
career on a collision course.

My first inkling of the psychological maelstrom suffered by this
generation of female students came in 1980, when I returned to New
Haven after eight years away (at my first job at Bennington, which
ended with a bang). Yale College had admitted its first women in
1969, while I was a graduate student. Returning to the Gross Cam-
pus Library, brand-new when I left, I was horrified to find the stalls
of the women's toilets covered with bizarre, ranting graffiti. There
was little humor or bawdiness; the principal imagery was of nausea,
disgust, and self-loathing. "Something is going wrong with femi-
nism," I said to friends at the time. The Yale graffiti seemed de-
mented, psychotic, like those one would expect to find at New York's
Port Authority Bus Terminal. When Brown girls created a national
furor in 1990 by posting names of alleged rapists in the toilets, the
media completely missed the real story: why were squalid toilets
now the forum for self-expression by supposed future leaders? These

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

sewer spaces, converted to pagan vomitoria, offer women students
their sole campus rendezvous with their own physiology.

The strident rape discourse is a hysterical eruption from the
deepest levels of American bourgeois life. Early in this phase of
feminism, it was still possible to say, ''Taste your menstrual
blood" — that is, reclaim your physicality. Today, with the callow
new brand of yuppie feminist with her simpering, prom-queen man-
ner, we have regressed to the Fifties era of cashmere sweaters and
pearls. The blood and guts of women's reproductive cycle are light-
years beyond the reach of these doilhouse moppets. White middle-
class feminists of every age have shown themselves spectacularly
unable to confront the grossness of their own physiological processes.
The passages in Sexual Personae vividly depicting that humid, lab-
yrinthine reality have made them flee like Victorian spinsters shriek-
ing at a mouse.

Until the bloody barbarousness of procreation is fully absorbed,
without the abstract jargon and genteel euphemisms that now dom-
inate gender studies, rape will not be understood. By defining rape
in exclusively social terms — as an attack by the powerful against
the powerless — feminism has missed the point. It is woman, as
mistress of birth, who has the real power. As my colleague Jack
DeWitt likes to say, "Any woman is more powerful than any man."

Rape is an act of desperation, a confession of envy and exclusion.
All men — even, I have written, Jesus himself — began as flecks of
tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the
shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes. Because
of my history of wavering gender and sexual orientation, I feel I
have a special insight into these matters: I see with the eyes of the
rapist. Hence I realize how dangerously misleading the feminist rape
discourse is. Rape is a breaking and entering; but so is the bloody
act of defloration. Sex is inherently problematic.

Women have it. Men want it. What is it? The secret of life,
symbolized in heroic sagas by the golden fleece sought by Jason, or
by the Gorgon's head brandished as a sexual trophy by Cellini's
Perseus. The rapist is sickened by the conflict between his humili-
ating neediness and his masculine rage for autonomy. He feels suf-
focated by woman and yet entranced and allured by her. He is
betrayed into dependency by his own impulses, the leaping urges of

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33

the body. Stalking women like prey returns him to prehistoric free-
dom, when the wiliest, swiftest, and strongest survived. Rape-murder
is a primitive theft of energy, a cannibalistic drinking of life force.

When toddlers or schoolgirls are kidnapped, brutally assaulted,
and killed, the world is rightly horrified and sickened. But why are
we surprised? Heinous acts of profanation and degradation fill the
annals of history and great literature — Neoptolemus' slaughter of
Priam at the altar, Herod's massacre of the innocents, the immure-
ment and bestial death of Dante's Ugolino. Until recently, most
societies had a clear idea of what constitutes "uncivilized" or "un-
godly" behavior and punished it accordingly. Today, in contrast,
there is a tendency to redefine the victimizer as himself a victim —
of a broken home or abusive parents — and then, ironically, to
broaden criminality to areas of consensual activities where women
are equally responsible for their behavior. When feminist discourse
is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the
homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.

Rape-murder comes from the brutish region of pure animal
appetite. Feminist confidence that the whole human race can be
"reeducated" to totally eliminate the possibility of rape is pure folly.
Even if, very optimistically, 80 percent of all men could be repro-
grammed, 20 percent would remain, toward whom women would
still have to remain vigilant. Even if 99 percent were neutralized —
absurdly unlikely — that would leave 1 percent, against whom wom-
en's level of self-defense would need to be just as high as against 90
percent. Wave after wave of boys hit puberty every year. Do fem-
inists, with their multicultural pretensions, really envision a massive
export of white bourgeois good manners all around the world? Speak
of imperialism! When Balthasar, one of the Magi, advises Ben-Hur
to leave vengeance to God, the sheik murmurs, "Balthasar is a good
man. But until all men are like him, we must keep our swords
bright."

The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis
are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-
on-man sex crimes. If rape were really just a process of political
intimidation of women by men, why do men rape and kill other
males? The deceptively demure persona of the soft-spoken, homo-
sexual serial-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, like that of handsome,

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

charming Ted Bundy, should warn everyone that we still live in a
sexual jungle. Nothing in feminist ideology addresses the grim truth
that beauty itself may be an incitement to destroy, that there is a
frenzy of primitive pleasure in torturing captives or smashing things.
I learned from art about the willful violation of innocence. When
babies, nuns, or grandmothers are raped, it can be understood only
in terms of what pagan antiquity called "pollution," a sullying of
the sacred. Feminist overstress on power differentials gets us no-
where; it cannot explain spasmodic bursts of slashing criminal lust.

The problem with America's current preoccupation with child
abuse is that cultural taboos automatically eroticize what is forbid-
den. Marking off zones of purity increases their desirability and
ensures their profanation. Children are not that innocent, and we
must put an end to Anglo-American hypocrisy on this question.
Children, sanctified by Victorian Romanticism, are quite capable of
perverse and horrific fantasy, without adult suggestion. A century
after Freud proposed his theory of infantile sexuality, most parents
(outside of Malibu or Tribeca) still cannot intellectually accept it —
partly because doing so would activate the incest taboo. The enor-
mous publicity about child-abuse has certainly increased safety
awareness, but I doubt it has lowered the crime rate. Snatching a
perfect child from under the noses of society's guardians has become
the ultimate subversive act of the outlaw. Such criminality, I main-
tained in Sexual Personae, is the product not of a bad environment
but of the opposite, a failure of social conditioning. Serial rape-
murderers, cool, logical, and precise, are not "insane" and deserve
to be executed, not as deterrence but as justice for the survivors.

Far from being inhuman or "monstrous," sex crime is a ritual
enactment of natural aggressions latent in all sexuality, which is
primarily mating behavior and has only recently been redefined in
recreational terms. The best survey I have yet seen of the clashing
psychodynamics of eroticism is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
(1590), which remains amazingly applicable today, four hundred
years after it was written. Spenser sees the fine gradations of sexual
behavior, from chivalrous courtship to duplicitous seduction and
loutish brigandage. Studying the poem in depth in the Seventies, I
identified what I called its "rape cycle." Like a specter stalking a
college mixer, Spenser acutely describes the tantalizing sexual vul-

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35

nerability of passive femininity and the militant warriorship of ma-
ture, self-reliant womanhood. Naivete evokes its own destruction.
This is not "blaming the victim"; it is saying victimhood cannot
become a vocation.

Until feminism permits the return of the ancient identification
of woman and nature in its full disturbing power, rape will remain
an enigma. Rape is an invasion of territory, a despoilment of virgin
ground. The radically different sexual geography of men's and wom-
en's bodies has led to feminist inability to understand male psy-
chology. "She made me do it": this strange assertion by rapists
expresses man's sense of subservience to woman's sexual allure. The
rapist feels enslaved, insignificant: women seem enclosed, imper-
vious. From the outside, female sexuality glows like the full moon.
The stormy complexity of the rapist's inner life has been obscured
by the therapeutic jargon he is soon speaking in prison, once he has
been brainwashed by the social-welfare workers. Until women grasp
the blood-sport aspect of rape, they will be unable to protect them-
selves.

Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of
public television in America — demonstrate that the female chooses.
Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of
themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its
dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when
in fact — as I know full well, from my own mortifying lesbian ex-
perience — men are tormented by women's flirtatiousness and hem-
ming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their
humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part
of women's merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for
potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women.
Women literally size up men — "What can you show me?" — in bed
and out. If middle-class feminists think they conduct their love lives
perfectly rationally, without any instinctual influences from biology,
they are imbeciles.

Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become
a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious
values and mean to remain virgin until marriage. Others are leery
of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others,
anything goes: they'll jump into bed on the first date. What's a guy

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

to do? Surely, for the good of the human species, we want to keep
men virile and vigorous. They should feel free to seek sex and to
persuade reluctant women. As a libertarian, I believe that we have
absolute right to our own body and that no one may lay a hand on
us without our consent. But consent may be nonverbal, expressed
by language or behavior — such as going to a stranger's apartment
on the first date, which I think should correctly be interpreted as
consent to sex. "Verbal coercion" is a ridiculous concept: I agree
with Ovid that every trick of rhetoric should be used in the slippery
art of love.

Sexual personae are the key to this new age of uncertainty. I
follow the gay male model in defining every date as a potential sexual
encounter. Given that the rules are in flux, the issue of sexual avail-
ability must be negotiated, implicitly or explicitly, from the first
moment on. Women must take responsibility for their share in this
exchange, which means they must scrupulously critique their own
mannerisms and clothing choices and not allow themselves to drift
willy-nilly into compromising situations. As a teacher, I have seen
time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who
projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused, help-me-please per-
sona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones
who end up with the string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situ-
ations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them
"honey."

Deconstruction of the bourgeois code of "niceness" is a priority
here. My generation tried it but seems mostly to have failed. Second,
white girls need a crash course in common sense. You get back what
you put out. Or as I say about girls wearing Madonna's harlot
outfits, if you advertise, you'd better be ready to sell! Suburban girls
don't realize that they were raised in an artificially pacified zone
and that the world at large, including the college campus, is a far
riskier place. I call my feminism "streetwise" or "street-smart" fem-
inism. Women from working-class families usually agree with my
view of the foolhardiness of feminist rhetoric, which encourages girls
to throbbingly proclaim, "We can dress just as we want and go
anywhere we want at any time!" This is true only to the point that
women are willing to remain in a state of wary alertness and to fight

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37

their own fights. Men are in danger too. In America, one sees over-
protected white girls bopping obliviously down the city street, lost
in their headphones, or jogging conspicuously and bouncingly bra-
less, a sight guaranteed to invite unwanted attention.

It is tremendously difficult to convince feminist professional
women of the existence of unconscious or subliminal erotic com-
munication. As my friend Bruce Benderson says, their middle-class
world has "no subtext." Women of the Sixties had far bolder and
more salacious imaginations. The career system into which women
have definitively won entry over the past twenty-five years seems to
have rigidified their thinking. Stalinist literalism has become the
norm. Shocked disbelief greets suggestions that many women may
take pleasure in rape fantasies, established long ago by Nancy Friday
in her pioneering 1973 study, My Secret Garden, and dramatized today
in the staggering mass-market popularity of Harlequin Romances,
where heroines are overwhelmed by passionate, impetuous men. My
warning description of the buffoonish "fun element" and "mad in-
fectious delirium" of gang rape particularly infuriated many middle-
class feminists, even though the point is easily proved by movies like
Two Women, The Virgin Spring, A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, Death
Wish, or North Dallas Forty. That men can satisfy their desires on an
inert or unconscious object seems intolerable to such women, though
it is a fact of life, palatable or not. Male sexual functioning does not
depend on female response. And the illicit is always highly charged.

All crimes of sex or mutilation contain pagan paradigms, hidden
ritual symbolism we must learn to read. Pious rubrics like "Violence
Against Women" — the stentorian title of a 1993 Congressional bill —
are too simplistic. Surges of instinctual power are going on beneath
the surface of every human exchange. Having sex with a woman is
an earned action and honorific for young men, who lack an internal
rite of passage like menstruation and who must therefore create an
adult sexual identity for themselves in ways that women do not. Sex
crime is revenge against women as an abstract class for wounds
already suffered by men as a class — the wound of birth and its
consequent galling dependencies. Until we widen the lens to take in
nature, women will not know what is happening or how to control
it. Victimization is a dead end. Better to meditate instead on the

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

great pagan archetypes of the mother, with her terrible duality of
creation and destruction. Women must accept their own ambiva-
lence in order to wield their birthright of dominion over men.

3. sex war:

ABORTION, BATTERING, SEXUAL. HARASSMENT

The principal controversies of recent feminism have usually in
some way involved a failure to deal with the issue of aggression. In
the hundred-year-old nature versus nurture debate, contemporary
feminists have taken the Rousseauist position that we are born good
and society makes us bad. The naturists among them are ultimately
twin to the nurturists, or social constructionists, since the former
see nature as uniformly benign, despite constant catastrophic evi-
dence to the contrary. Sentimental overidealization of women runs
throughout anti-male feminist thought, from the prim, solemn Carol
Gilligan to the acridly cynical Marilyn French, with their flagrant
misreadings of social history.

The campaign for abortion rights, which has polarized America,
was systematically mismanaged by feminist leaders, partly because
of their refusal to acknowledge the violence inherent in any termi-
nation of life. The same people who opposed capital punishment
ironically fought for abortion on demand, showing a peculiar dis-
crimination about whom to execute. Squeamishly sensitive about
their humanitarian self-image, feminists have used convoluted ca-
suistry to define the aborted fetus in purely material terms as inert
tissue, efficiently flushed.

My views are more consistent: I support the death penalty for
outrageous crimes, such as political assassination or serial rape-
murder, and I am fervently pro-abortion — the term 4 'pro-choice" is
a cowardly euphemism. Women's modern liberation is inextricably
linked to their ability to control reproduction, which has enslaved
them from the origin of the species. It is nature, again, that is our
real oppressor. Men's contribution to conception and gestation is
minimal, compared to the burden borne by pregnant and nursing
women. Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the
birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than
feminism itself.

NO LAW IN THE ARENA 39

The vicious stereotyping of abortion opponents as "anti-
woman" or "far right fanatics" has been one of the most deplorable
habits of the feminist establishment. For years, mass mailings of the
National Organization for Women were filled with hysterical rhet-
oric that repelled and alienated even abortion supporters like me.
With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never
admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics.
In fact, the ethical weight may be on the other side in this debate.
We career women are arguing from expedience: it is personally and
professionally inconvenient or onerous to bear an unwanted child.
The pro-life movement, in contrast, is arguing that every conception
is sacred and that society has a responsibility to protect the defense-
less.

Among the most memorable moments in my career as a public
speaker occurred in September 1992, when I pressed this issue during
my lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the
Herbst Theater in San Francisco. It was risky: feminist orthodoxy
had jelled around abortion rights, and challenge was not brooked.
But as I, from the position of abortion advocacy, dramatized the
injustice of feminist contempt for the pro-life position, an eerie silence
fell over the crowd. It was as if we all felt the uneasy conscience of
feminism.

The inflexible sectarianism of feminist leaders was on embar-
rassing public view during the 1990 Senate Judiciary Committee
hearings for the nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court.
Present and past presidents of NOW (including Eleanor Smeal) and
their partisans sat with querulous expressions of childish petulance
and whined and sneered at the all-male panel before them. Abortion,
just one of many pressing issues facing the nation, had become a
low gate through which any nominee to the court had to stoop. The
women's performance was loathsome. It is by such self-defeating
exercises in solipsism that feminism has repeatedly injured itself.

That another, more intelligent and sophisticated approach is
possible was proved by the next witness, Faye Wattleton, presi-
dent of Planned Parenthood, who was accompanied by the ever-
reasonable Kate Michaelman, head of the National Abortion Rights
League. Dignified and articulate, Wattleton presented the pro-
abortion case with crisp, cool professionalism. Unlike the others, she

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

showed respect for the occasion and the historical setting. Beautiful,
elegant, and grand, she demonstrated that it is African-American
women, not white middle-class feminists, who have already created
the ideal female persona of the twenty-first century.

The problem with the abortion rights crusade is that it is locked
in a secular mind-set of me-first entitlement. Religious objections to
abortion are based on devout study of the Bible, understood by
believers as the word of God. "Be fruitful, and multiply" (Gen. 1:28):
it is not enough to respond that this admonition to a small, struggling
ancient people may no longer be applicable to an overpopulated
world of dwindling resources. Theologians are not grocery managers
taking inventory. For the faithful, God's plan is beyond human
understanding, and one cannot pick and choose among his com-
mands.

To rescue feminism, we must give religion its due but require
it to stay in its place. Again, Judeo-Christianity is only half our
tradition. Paganism has other paradigms to offer. The militant virgin
goddesses, Athena and Artemis, with their cold autonomy, are her-
oines of mine. Plato speaks of two Aphrodites, a common one of
physical childbirth and the other, the Uranian, patron of spiritual
and intellectual influence, specially associated with homoerotic re-
lations. Evasion of nature's biological imperative is distinctly human.
I take the extreme view of that Enlightenment neopagan, the Mar-
quis de Sade, who lauds abortion and sodomy for their bold frus-
tration of mother nature's relentless fertility. My code of modern
Amazonism says that nature's fascist scheme of menstruation and
procreation should be defied, as a gross infringement of woman's free
will.

Unlike the feminist establishment, I recognize that abortion is
killing. But slaughter and harvest — symbolized by the sickle crescent
of the moon goddess (which appears as a castrating blade in Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon) — are the record of human sustenance and
survival for ten thousand years. A pagan vision, like that of Ten-
nessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, will see the terrifying mass
destruction in nature's procreative plan. Nature scatters a billion
seeds to the wind. We must philosophically strengthen feminist the-
ory so that it can admit that abortion is an aggressive act, that it is

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41

a form of extermination. Modern woman has become an agent of
Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits
the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives. The feminist
coat-hanger symbol, prophesying the return of back-alley butchery
if abortion is regulated or banned, is dishonest. A small number of
women may die in botched procedures, but in successful abortions,
the fetus death rate is 100 percent.

As a libertarian, I support unrestricted access to abortion be-
cause I have reasoned that my absolute right to my body takes
precedence over the brute claims of mother nature, who wants to
reduce women to their animal function as breeders. Women who
want to achieve are at war with nature, as is shown by the hormonally
disordering effects of career stress or extreme athletic training. In
the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-
related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering
over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat
reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other
words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits.
Women inspired by the Uranian Aphrodite to produce spiritual
progeny should view abortion as a sword of self-defense put into
their hands by Ares, the war god. Government, guaranteeing free-
dom of religion, has no right to interfere in our quarrel with our
Creator, in this case pagan nature. Under the carnal constitution
that precedes social citizenship, women have the right to bear arms.
The battlefield is internal, and it belongs to us.

Aggression must be returned to the center of feminist thinking.
The rape discourse derailed itself early on by its nonsensical for-
mulation, "Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex," a mantra
that, along with "No always means no," blanketed the American
media until I arrived on the scene. Feminists had an astoundingly
naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which,
Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed
to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called
"unbridled lust," like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint,
seems to be beyond feminist ken. Rape is piggish, cave-man, hand-
to-mouth gorging, the rudimentary, subsistence-level stage of moral
development of tots at "the terrible twos," when they must be taught

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not to bash other children over the head to steal their sweets. Evo-
lution does exist in history, and it is recapitulated in effective child-
rearing.

The absence of a feminist theory of aggression is blatant in the
so-called "battered woman syndrome," yet another major article of
current dogma. We are instructed by the earnest social-welfare prel-
ates, their faces permanently creased in ostentatious Christlike com-
passion, that women who have been beaten for years by lovers or
husbands become lethargic prisoners of war, brainwashed hostages
without free will who must be excused from any atrocious act they
commit, in lieu of something so simple as actually packing up and
leaving. Even cutting off a man's penis while he is sleeping is legit-
imized as "temporary insanity," as shown by the questionable ac-
quittal in 1994 of Lorena Bobbitt, a Latin firecracker who knew
exactly what she was doing not only when she wielded the knife but
when she turned on the waterworks for the jury. The Bobbitt case,
which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as
castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and
that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the
feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned
nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic
art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of
love, jealousy, and revenge than do the pat formulas of the counseling
industry.

Feminism as a world movement must continue to address the
grave problem in economically underdeveloped countries of women
being treated as chattel or even killed by husbands or families for
being a financial burden. Feminists are to be commended when they
provide legal advice and material resources for escape from such
intractable conditions. However, that battered women in the in-
dustrialized democracies do not leave home because they are finan-
cially dependent on their mates is fast ceasing to be a credible excuse.
A 1991 study of admissions of battered middle-class women to a San
Francisco hospital emergency room found that 70 percent were not
in fact financially dependent on their assailants — a rare example of
a survey eluding control by the statistics-churning feminist propa-
ganda machines, those "independent" think tanks with suspiciously
close ties to government commissions.

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

43

For twenty years, armies of battered women and their counselor-
spokesmen have trooped through television talk shows. From the
start, I was troubled by a frequent discrepancy between the victims'
demeanor and testimony and the simplistic, male-blaming rhetoric
imposed on their experience by their smug professional escorts. The
rigid political paradigm of oppressor/victim was the only one per-
mitted. There was rarely much psychological inquiry into the sticky
complexities of sexual attraction and conflict that implicate both
partners in any long-running private drama.

As a feminist, I detest the rhetorical diminution of woman into
passive punching bag, which is the basic premise of the "battered
woman syndrome." Men strike women for quite another reason:
because physical superiority is their only weapon against a being
far more powerful than they. The blow does not subordinate; it
equalizes. Aggression expresses itself in more than one way in the
cycle of domestic violence (which includes underreported husband-
battering). The polemical tactic of exhibiting garish mugshot photos
of women's bruised faces evades the real issue. What led up to that
moment in the emergency room? A video camera recording the
episode before and after the assault would upset the received black-
and-white view of male ogres and female martyrs. This is not to
excuse men for their scurrilous behavior; it is to awaken women to
their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation.

Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident
is complicitous with him. I conjecture the basic scenario of many
cases as follows. The batterer, like the serial adulterer, is an infantile
personality who is fixated on the mother archetype in his wife. He
demands her undivided attention, the narcotic of her quiet conso-
lation. But he compulsively enjoys shattering her composure and
destroying the family equilibrium she tries so hard to maintain. It's
a terrorist way of keeping her alert, focused on him. The more he
misbehaves, the more she feels he needs her. She finds his adolescent
rambunctiousness both daunting and endearing — and, it has to be
said, sexually exciting.

She goads in her own way, little needling assertions of her ter-
ritory and her rule over him. She implies he is inept, incapable of
caring for himself without her. When he postures and demands, she
is vague, vacillating; he can't reach her. He finds her serene self-

44

VAMPS & TRAMPS

containment intolerable because it ultimately represents women's
priority to man, her unchallengeable control over procreation. No
verbal argument can shake that.

What leads up to the first blow is always the same: provoked
or not, she has pushed his buttons of dependency. Once again, he
faces his insignificance in women's eyes. He has dwindled back to
boyhood, where women ruled him. To recover his adult masculinity,
he lashes out at her with his fists. He savors her pain and fear, but
her refusal to defend herself takes the fight out of him. He is sickened,
desperate, apologetic.

Here is the crux of the relationship, which has to be defined as
sadomasochistic on both sides. His pleading reactivates the maternal
in her. She forgives him. Never is he more open, vulnerable, and
intimate than when he begs for a second chance — "I'll never do it
again." His tenderness and affection enamor her. She is addicted to
the apology. She is overwhelmed by sensory ecstasy, by the heightened
passions of rage and frenzy yielding to the melting reunion of boy
and mother, who nestles her son against her bosom. As in the self-
flagellation of medieval Catholicism, physical pain may produce
spiritual exaltation. The battered woman stays because she thinks
she sees the truth and because, secretly, she knows she is victorious.

Until it is recognized that women in these relationships are
exerting their own form of aggression, battering will remain an
enigma. Covert manipulation is just as powerful and far less easy
to combat. The current etiology — that abuser and abused come from
"dysfunctional" homes — makes little sense when one is also told
that 90 percent of all families are dysfunctional. (The best critique
of this mushy strain in recent American culture is Wendy Kaminer's
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.) Physical violence may be a
form of simple catharsis, a ritualistic way of venting pent-up anxieties
and hostilities originating outside the relationship. Bloody peniten-
tial techniques have pagan as well as Christian roots, notably among
the Aztecs and Anatolians. Our culture lacks formal outlets for these
universal urges, except in our notoriously violent movies.

The mutual war game concealed by the judgmental term "bat-
tered woman syndrome" may contain obscure cravings for deeper
knowledge of life, for it is not patriarchy but matriarchy that is older
and more fundamental. A Zen analysis of such a struggling pair

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

45

would not find the man winning. In pondering why a battered
woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste
for violent "rough trade" have always paid for this kind of sex. Are
women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having
sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized,
women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain
everything in the tragicomedy of love.

Sexual harassment, the newest of the feminist issues, has degrees
of severity, the worst being the terroristic stalking of women by ex-
boyfriends or estranged husbands. By the time these painfully drawn
out situations come to public notice, the woman may actually have
been murdered.* Sometimes it is the woman who does the stalking,
as in the 1989 Betty Broderick case, when an hysterical San Diego
woman shot to death her lawyer ex-husband and his pretty new
bride in their bed. These crime dramas are detailed on hour-long
talk shows, where relatives, friends, neighbors, police, and the per-
petrators themselves (often televised from prison) narrate the history
of the conflict and its explosive finale. Then on come the therapists
and crisis counselors to reduce these ambiguous sagas to bromides.

What are the roots of obsession? To interpret the crazed idolatry
that turns into hostility and destruction, you need to immerse your-
self in the psychological world of great plays and novels — Iago's
mysterious motivation, Othello's paroxysmic rage. Men who kill the
women they love have reverted to pagan cult. She whom a man
cannot live without has become a goddess, an avatar of his half-
divinized, half-demonized mother, a magic fountain of cosmic crea-
tivity. Without her, he cannot exist; he is obliterated. That anyone
else should have her love, or even her gaze or presence, he cannot
endure. It is an injustice, and so she becomes unjust: she must be
punished. He interprets her refusal to see him as an act of war, so
he lays siege to her citadel. To invade it and force himself into her
attention restores his identity and importance. To harass, upset, and
even kill her is to perpetuate his relationship with her. He would
rather be hated than ignored. Like Richard III, he glories in his

*In June 1994, five months after this essay was completed, football star
O J. Simpson was charged with the brutal murder of his ex-wife and a male
friend.

46

VAMPS & TRAMPS

monstrosity, his ostracism by humanity. He goes willingly to prison
and even to the gas chamber: this is 'Tor her" and their love.

Until they understand the unstable dynamic of sexual attraction,
women of heartbreakingly good intentions will continue to be drawn
into these endless, agonizing struggles that may end in violence. It
is not enough to say that men must change. Intimidation and assault
are of course unacceptable in civilized society. Those who break the
law must suffer the consequences. But emotion is a maelstrom. Polite,
charitable people of unblemished records sometimes go completely
haywire when tormented by love. Apollo and Dionysus are always
at odds. Passion disorders.

What I am calling for is a massive restoration of psychology to
feminist thought. For reasons still unclear, we have completely lost
the hip Freudianism and shrewd self-satirizing insights that were
common coin in my generation's all-night college bull sessions, which
resembled Nichols and May comedy sketches. Whining and shrew-
ishness are today's favored campus style. A purely political analysis
cannot help the very pretty, too "nice" girl being pursued and shoved
around by an oafish fellow she has dropped — a scene I witnessed
as a student in a Harpur College parking lot. Several of us had to
intervene, as the boy began breaking icy snow-chunks over her head.
Even then, I was struck by the girl's maternal patience and mel-
ancholy affection, as she made no effort to fend off the blows but
simply huddled, weeping, against the hood of a car. She saw, and
we did too, that the violence came not from his sense of power but
from its opposite, his wounded desperation and helplessness.

It may be a principle of womanliness to forgive men for their
childish excesses. I certainly am deficient in this area, for, as part
of my general sexual alienation, I forgive nothing. On the contrary,
I have made it my business, as the record shows, to personally punish
every male trespass on female rights. But much violence against
women originates in emotional territory that they already command.
By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change,
women are in total, despotic control of their marriages.

First of all, wearisome as it may seem, women must realize that,
in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his un-
conscious life with his mother and have therefore inherited the am-
bivalence of that relation. Second, stalking by strangers is caused

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

47

by projection, in which a woman (or boy) becomes an involuntary
player in a shadowy fantasy that may recapitulate the stalker's child-
hood or that may, less predictably, be a psychotic crime-as-art
drama. Defending against the wraithlike intangibility of the latter
will always require wariness, wisdom, and personal responsibility
on women's part.

The unpleasant truth is that we can never fully legislate the
human psyche. Strange aberrations will continue to manifest them-
selves at every level of society. Since murder victims cannot be
resurrected, we need to give women a shrewder view of the world,
so that they can better manage problems or avoid them altogether.
Too many girls want to be liked, and not always because, in the
current line, they are socialized to seek approval. I suspect most
women are genetically more empathic, not as a moral value (in the
tedious Gilligan manner) but as an intuitive faculty of infant care.
Women's well-documented superiority in reading facial expressions,
as well as their hormonally produced, hypersensitive thinner skin,
supports this. What I see is not a world of male oppression and
female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to
keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange ma-
ternal protectiveness is at work.

In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must
stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of
harassment and stalking, it is clear that the women never learned
how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisive-
ness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear
will only intensify or prolong pursuit. In war, one must counterattack
and then cut clean and stand on one's own. Calm, contemptuous
indifference, rather than panic, is more likely to succeed. Imprisoned
serial rapists have constantly said that the pleading of victims ac-
tually inflamed their lust. Intimidation usually stops when it ceases
to be effective, which is why I think the tactic of escalating restraining
orders, endorsed by many crisis counselors, can be dangerous and
counterproductive. In most cases, the police alone cannot stop a
determined stalker. As best they can, women must fight their own
fights and oversee their own defense.

In the less life-threatening area of the office, sexual harassment
has become a key theme of contemporary professional life. I support

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

moderate sexual harassment guidelines: after evaluating sample ac-
ademic codes in my "Women and Sex Roles" class in 1986, 1 lobbied
for their adoption at my university. Schools of the performing arts
may be particularly vulnerable to this problem, since vocational
teachers, unlike standard lecturers, must sometimes touch students
as part of the instruction process. In dance class, a teacher may
need to realign the arms, legs, or feet, or in cello class, to encircle
a student with his or her arms to remedy weaknesses in bowing.
Arts schools are also more likely to have a bigger roster of older,
distinguished part-time faculty whose lives center elsewhere and
whose commitment to the institution is minimal.

White middle-class freshmen girls seemed especially to need help
in self-definition and self-expression, and sexual harassment guide-
lines were a promising way to embolden them to decide how they
wanted to be treated. On the other hand, I was concerned about
the possibility of false charges by grandstanding neurotics, with
whom I'd had quite enough contact at Bennington. Every sexual
harassment code should incorporate stiff penalties for false accusa-
tion, presently rarely mentioned. This is also a glaring omission from
the national rape debate. It was clear, from my own observations
as well as student testimony, that some girls know instinctively how
to halt unwanted familiarities and others do not but even make things
worse by blushing and brightly smiling in ways that mime flirtation
and pleasure. Social conventions are partly to blame, but I think
we must hold even teenaged girls responsible for the persona they
choose, since for most of their lives it has brought them the rewards
of attention and popularity.

I categorically reject current feminist cant that insists that the
power differential of boss/worker or teacher/student makes the lesser
party helpless to resist the hand on the knee, the bear hug, the sloppy
kiss, or the off-color joke. Servility to authority to win favor is an
old story; it was probably business-as-usual in Babylon. Objective
research would likely show that the incidence of sycophancy by
subordinates far exceeds that of coercion by bosses. That a woman,
whether or not she has dependent children, has no choice but to
submit without protest to a degrading situation is absurd. Women,
as much as men, have the obligation to maintain their human dig-
nity, without recourse to a posteriori tribunals (much less those a

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

49

decade later, as with wily Anita Hill). It is an hour-by-hour, month-
by-month, year-by-year process. Literally from the first moment of
arrival at a job or in any social situation, a person is being tested
and must set the tone by his or her responses. My entire Italian-
immigrant extended family, in its transition over fifty years from
blue-collar to white-collar work, has followed that policy of forth-
rightness and self-respect. Lack of money does not excuse groveling.

The quid pro quo ruse — where a sex act is demanded for a pro-
motion or job security — is the most grievous of sexual harassment
offenses and should be suitably punished, but one wonders just how
common so clumsily blatant a proposition is these days. I suspect
some men just try for what they can get, and a few unprepared,
overly trusting women fall for it. We cannot expect government to
make up for ancient lapses in child rearing. The "hostile workplace"
clause, on the other hand, which has become an integral part of
sexual harassment policy and has even, to my regret, passed review
by the Supreme Court, seems to me reactionary and totalitarian.
Mere offensiveness, which is open to subjective interpretation, is not
harassment. The problem with the "hostile workplace" concept is
that it is culturally parochial: it imposes a genteel white lady's stan-
dard of decorum on everyone, and when blindly applied by man-
agement, it imperialistically exports white middle-class manners,
appropriate to an office, into the vigorously physical and more re-
alistic working-class realm. The mincing minuets and sexual eti-
quette of the scribal class of paperpushers make no sense outside
their carpeted cubicles of fluorescent light.

The folly of this nomenclature is that every workplace is hostile,
as any man who has worked his way up the cutthroat corporate
ladder will testify. Teamwork requires cooperation, but companies
without internal and external competition remain stagnant. Inno-
vation and leadership require strategies of opposition and outstrip-
ping, however one wants to disguise it. The "transformative
feminism" of thinkers like Suzanne Gordon (whose progressive pol-
itics I respect), which imagines a pleasant, stress-free work envi-
ronment where the lion lies down with the lamb, is unreachably
Utopian. Once again, aggression is not being confronted here. For
every winner, there are a hundred losers. The workplace is the pagan
arena, where head-on crashes are the rule.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

It is outrageous that the "hostile workplace" clause is now rou-
tinely applied to coarse or ribald language, as when in 1993 a Boston
Globe writer jokingly called another male staffer "pussywhipped"
and was reported by a female employee and fined by his editor.
Nude images are also affected by this clause, as when laborers are
puritanically forbidden to post risque calendars or tape Playboy pic-
tures to their lockers or even, as in Los Angeles firehouses, to read
Playboy at work. A graduate student at the University of Nebraska
was forced to remove a photo of his bikini-clad wife from his desk,
when two female fellow students complained to the chairman that
they felt sexually harassed by it. This used to be called "paranoia."
Why are snippy neurotics running our lives?

In a highly publicized incident, a dowdy English instructor
pressured Penn State administrators to take down a print of Goya's
Naked Maja from her classroom in an arts building, where it had
hung unmolested for decades. She complained that the students were
looking at it instead of her (I can't imagine why). The situation has
gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases,
a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ball-
cock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct
term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back
to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put
the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind.

My libertarian position is that, in a democracy, words must not
be policed. Whatever good some people feel may be gained by re-
strictions on speech, it is enormously outweighed by the damage
done to any society where expression is restricted. History shows
that all attempts to limit words end by stifling thought. I am a
Sixties free speech militant. As part of our rebellion, we middle-class
girls flung around the raunchiest four-letter words we could find:
we were trying to shatter the code of gentility, delicacy, and prudery
that had imprisoned respectable women since the rise of the
bourgeoisie after the industrial revolution. Pictures too are protected
expression: I define images as pagan speech.

There are very few instances where speech properly falls under
government scrutiny, and those involve either fraudulent represen-
tations in business contracts or disturbances of the peace, such as
shouting "fire" in a crowded theater or disrupting residential neigh-

NO LAW IN THE ARENA SI

borhoods or campuses by noisy late-night reveling. In the latter, if
offensive epithets are used, it is not the content of the words that is
punishable but the fact that anything at all is shouted at that hour.
Epithets and stereotypes are not fraudulent in a commercial sense;
they are crudely distorted or parodistic versions of a substratum of
historical truth or perception, which no one, however well-meaning,
has a right to erase.

I question the concept of "fighting words," except when an
arresting officer or judge weighing sentencing considers whether a
brawl that led to injury was provoked by an insult — which could
be aspersions on one's beauty, taste, character, or virility as easily
as on one's race or ethnicity. Attitudes are not changed by forbidding
their expression; on the contrary, forcing social resentments under-
ground simply increases the power of conservative ideologues or
fascist extremists to speak for the silenced. Campus speech codes,
that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the
right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised
egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the
universities have committed suicide.

Sexual harassment guidelines, if overdone, will end by harming
women more than helping them. In the rough play of the arena,
women must make their own way. If someone offends you by speech,
you must learn to defend yourself by speech. The answer cannot be
to beg for outside help to curtail your opponent's free movement.
The message conveyed by such attitudes is that women are too weak
to win by men's rules and must be awarded a procedural advantage
before they even climb into the ring. Teasing and taunting have
always been intrinsic to the hazing rituals of male bonding. The
elaborate shouting matches and satirical putdowns of African tribal
life can still be heard in American pop music ("You been whupped
with the ugly stick!" — uproarious laughter) and among drag queens,
where it's called "throwing shade." Middle-class white women have
got to get over their superiority complex and learn to talk trash with
the rest of the human race.

A sex-free workplace is neither possible nor desirable. Many
people meet their spouses at work, just as students may marry their
professors. After the mannish John Molloy dress-for-success look of
the Seventies, when women first moved massively into fast-track

VAMPS & TRAMPS

careers, the more glamourous Eighties professional style allowed
women to recover their femininity while still being taken seriously
on the job. But we must face the fact that women's formal dress is
inherently more erotic than men's. There is a subliminally arous-
ing sensuality to perfume, lipstick, nail lacquer, vivid colors, silky
fabrics, delicate jewelry, and high-heeled pumps. Exposed legs,
which early Neanderthal feminists saw as a symbol of subordination
(more exposed flesh = less power), are in the Nineties beginning to
be understood as a visible incarnation of women's sexual power.

For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by
fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every
day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch,
and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety
of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress,
no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the enter-
tainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.
Men's aesthetic impulses have been stifled since the industrial rev-
olution. Beautiful, fragile clothing is historically an aristocratic pre-
rogative, signifying freedom from manual labor. The contemporary
clothing debate echoes the seventeenth-century standoff between
Cavaliers and Puritans, those earnest workaholics whose sober black
dress as our "Pilgrim Fathers" is foisted on us yearly in Thanksgiving
iconography.

In the modern workplace, men are drones, and women are queen
bees. Men's corporate costume, with its fore-and-aft jacket flaps,
conceals their sexuality. Woman's eroticized dress inescapably
makes her the center of visual interest, whether people are conscious
of it or not. Most women, as well as most men, straight or gay,
instantly appraise whether a woman has "good legs" or a big bosom,
not because these attributes diminish her or reduce her to "meat"
(another feminist canard) but because they unjustifiably add to her
power in ways that may destabilize the workplace. Woman's sex-
uality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which
efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into
the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She
brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to con-
tain it.

One reason I favor reasonable sexual harassment guidelines is

NO LAW IN THE ARENA

53

that they alert women to the erotic energies they inspire. But the
matter is not asymmetrical, with virtuous women dutifully going
about their tasks when — horrors! — jets of inky male lust spurt in
their direction. (Cf. Hitchcock's Marnie madly bolting for the ladies
room when red ink spots her sleeve.) I protest the recent creation,
as if by dragon's teeth, of a master class of sexual harassment com-
missars, the cadres of specialists and consultants with their vested
economic interest in this field. Like the campus kangaroo courts
(the date-rape and speech-code grievance committees, with their
haphazard roosters), the sexual harassment inquisitors are poorly
trained for what they are doing. The dreary worldview of professional
bureaucrats is untouched by Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, Wilde, or
Shaw. How has the society that invented rock and roll ended up in
the grip of these schoolmarmish monitors of sexual mores?

Class values have been seriously neglected in feminism, which
takes a simplistic designer-Marxist view of the proletarian-as-victim.
When they do not docilely act like victims, laborers are treated like
heathen. For example, construction workers are demonized for their
lunchtime diversion of staring, leering, whistling, and catcalling at
passing female office workers, some of whom — lawyers and execu-
tives — regard themselves as very mighty indeed and far too lofty for
such treatment. One side of me finds these spectacles annoying and
sometimes enraging; the other cheers the workers on, for they are
among the last remaining masculine men of action in a world where
even soldiering has become computerized. We should applaud any-
thing that challenges and explodes bourgeois decorum in our over-
regimented nine-to-five world. There is likewise a class issue in the
prohibiting of nude centerfolds on lockers, since the pictorials of
men's magazines correspond, in my view, to museum prints of nude
paintings and sculpture that middle-class men can generally collect
and display without interference.

When pressed to excess, sexual harassment rules will inevitably
frustrate women's aspirations in another area: breaking through the
so-called "glass ceiling," the invisible barrier that allegedly stalls
women at middle management positions and keeps them out of
corporate boardrooms and top executive suites. Feminists blame the
"glass ceiling" on gender discrimination and the "old boy" network.
But many people, male and female, have difficulty forging a persona

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

of leadership, which may require talents different from the people-
oriented and clerical skills of middle managers.

When they are encouraged to overrely on the threat of sexual
harassment claims, women are being institutionally deprived of de-
velopment of precisely the hard-nosed, thick-skinned tactics they
need to reach the upper echelons. It is not just a particular job but
treacherous office politics that ambitious future executives must mas-
ter. Hostility and harassment of all kinds lie before you. Men set
traps for each other, as well as for women. A mirage of cordial fog
covers the snakepits. Breaking into a group requires staking out
one's territory, which among humans and other animals means fierce
skirmishes and border disputes. Women must find their own place
in the pecking order, for which open aggression is sometimes nec-
essary. You must bare your own fangs and not someone else's, if
you want to be leader of the pack.

Paradoxically, conservative women like Margaret Thatcher
have found it easier to reach the highest post in their countries.
Liberal women achieved political prominence in America under the
early Clinton presidency because the status of domestic social issues
rises in periods of peace. If we are ever to have a woman president,
she must, like Thatcher, demonstrate her readiness and ability to
command the military. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, for ex-
ample, one of the beaming Betty Crockers who drive crabby Sixties
feminists like me crazy, has not shown, despite her long experience
on the Armed Services Committee, any of the qualities of reserved
authority necessary to win the confidence and respect of the troops,
whom, in an emergency, the president must lead. This constitutional
obligation was self-destructively neglected by Bill Clinton himself,
whose strong mother made him sensitive to women's concerns but
whose lack of a positive father figure made him indifferent to military
matters until it was too late (the mishandling of the controversy
over gays in the military being one result).

Empathy alone will never propel a woman into the White House.
Women will continue to become senators and governors, but the
presidency will be won only by the female candidate who finds the
correct sexual persona. Leadership is warm on the surface but cold
at its heart. At the top, one must have the long view, a disciplined
detachment. Every decision requires betraying something or some-

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55

one else. In war, individuals may have to be cruelly sacrificed for
the survival of the whole. Movies about the great age of sailing ships
show what I mean: under fire, the captain is a still, stable point of
steely consciousness. As events swirl around him, he transmits his
orders in a low voice to the first mate, who shouts them to the crew
and ensures their enforcement. In contemporary terms, the chief
executive officer is not necessarily a "people person": he carries his
solitude with him.

In America, the best model yet for the first woman president
can be found among the Texas feminists, notably Governor Ann
Richards. East Coast feminists, like Gloria Steinem, who created the
smug, superior feminist smirk (done to an unctuous turn by NOW
president Patricia Ireland), have failed to produce a credible persona
for national leadership, partly because of their juvenile, jeering at-
titude toward men and masculinity. The irony is that the legal and
media world inhabited by Steinem and her coterie is filled with
bookish white-collar men who are the only ones in the world who
actually listen to feminist rhetoric and can be guilt-tripped into trying
to obey it. The younger feminists have not done much better. Though
in their thirties, Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf seem determined to
cling to perpetual girlhood. Faludi is the Mary Tyler Moore of
feminism ("Geeee, Mr. Grant!"), nice but easily flustered and cowed
in public. These are bobbysoxer Fifties personae, a docile, good-
daughter style also detectable in those spoiled, bland yuppies, the
failed Clinton nominees, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood.

In Texas, unlike the urban Northeast, men are men. Women
politicians in that state have the toughness and grit to handle men
at their most macho. Southern women, particularly those of the
plantation-belt "iron magnolia" school, are able to get what they
want and still retain their gracious femininity. Underneath the public
persona of Ann Richards, like that of Attorney General Janet Reno,
who has the mannish bearing of an admiral and whose Floridian
mother wrestled alligators, one can still feel the American pioneer
spirit. At moments, Richards and Reno seem like robust farm women
(cf. brusque, hearty Marjorie Main in The Women). In that state of
longhorn cattle, pit barbecue, and universal football, the Texas fem-
inists have a vigorous physicality completely missing from the tame,
sheltered, word-centered world of the Steinem politburo.

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Ancient Roman matrons, with their fidelity to clan and state,
had more gravitas than today's women politicians and professionals.
We need to rethink and reappropriate the old personae of grande
dame and dragon lady for new use today. Hanging on the walls of
the Seven Sisters, the elite women's colleges of the Northeast, are
stunning portraits of the early presidents and faculty, whose air of
distinction recalls a period in feminism when women accepted, and
were determined to match, the highest levels of male achievement.
I call them the "battle-ax maiden ladies," and they remain my
inspiration.

Another of my role models is St. Teresa of Avila {not that tender
teen, St. Therese of Lisieux, cradling her dainty roses). Obscure
until her flaming forties, Teresa fought with the bishops and sin-
glehandedly reformed the Spanish convents. She was an irascible,
hands-on mystic. My American patron saint is Annie Oakley, the
real-life sharpshooter known around the world from her tours with
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. This great home-grown persona
demonstrates that the best argument for women in combat is com-
bative women.

My prescription for women entering the war zone of the profes-
sions: study football. It is a classic textbook of the strategies and
controlled aggression of the ever-hostile workplace. A chapter in the
second volume of Sexual Personae analyzes the pagan motifs of football,
which is not only my favorite sport but my only real religion. Indeed,
I credit my success in attacking the academic and feminist estab-
lishment to a lifetime mania for football, which provides intricate
patterns of offense and defense, as well as impetus for hard hits and
my trademark open-field tackling. Women who want to remake the
future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but
to the brash assertions of pagan sport.

4. sex power: prostitution,
stripping, pornography

The bourgeois limitations in feminist theory are clearly dem-
onstrated by its difficulty in dealing with prostitution, which is in-
terpreted solely in outworn terms of victimization. That is, feminists
profess solidarity with the "sex workers" themselves but denounce

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57

prostitution as a system of male exploitation and enslavement. I
protest this trivializing of the world's oldest profession. I respect and
honor the prostitute, ruler of the sexual realm, which men must pay
to enter. In reducing prostitutes to pitiable charity cases in need of
their help, middle-class feminists are guilty of arrogance, conceit,
and prudery.

An early admirer of Sexual Personae who came to Philadelphia
to interview me was Tracy Quan, a working prostitute and activist
with P.O.N.Y. (Prostitutes of New York), who supported the stand
I had taken and described her violent fights with the doctrinaire
feminists overrunning the world prostitute movement. I maintained,
and Quan agreed, that the popular portrait of the hapless single
mother forced into prostitution by poverty or a vicious pimp was a
sentimental exaggeration. Psychologists were ushering ex-prostitutes
onto television programs to make tearful recantations of their former
careers and to testify that prostitutes hated their work and were
merely misguided victims of child abuse. Listening to the radio at
home, I heard Dr. Joyce Brothers confidently proclaim, "There
are no happy prostitutes" — to which I angrily blurted aloud, "Dr.
Brothers, there are no happy therapists!"

Moralism and ignorance are responsible for the constant ste-
reotyping of prostitutes by their lowest common denominator — the
sick, strung-out addicts, crouched on city stoops, who turn tricks
for drug money. Every profession (including the academic) has its
bums, cheats, and ne'er-do-wells. The most successful prostitutes in
history have been invisible. That invisibility was produced by their
high intelligence, which gives them the power to perceive, and
move freely but undetected within, the social frame. The prostitute
is a superb analyst, not only in evading the law but in intuiting the
unique constellation of convention and fantasy that produces a
stranger's orgasm. She lives by her wits as much as her body. She
is psychologist, actor, and dancer, a performance artist of hyper-
developed sexual imagination. And she is shrewd entrepreneur and
businesswoman: the madams of brothels, along with medieval ab-
besses, were the first female managers.

The power of ancient harlots, ancestors of Renaissance cour-
tesans and chic modern call-girls, is suggested in The Egyptian (1954),
the film of Mika Waltari's novel about the reign of Akhnaten and

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Xcfcrtiti. For assignations with a hypnotically beautiful Babylonian
temptress, the brilliant young Egyptian doctor surrenders his wealth,
his house, his precious medical instruments, and finally, most shock-
ingly, the embalming of his parents' bodies for the afterlife. When
he has nothing left, her servants slam the door in his face. The
Egyptian shows the prostitute as a sexual adept of magical skill and
accurately documents men's excruciating obsession with and sub-
ordination to women.

Temple prostitution seems to have occurred in the ancient Near
East, in association with goddess cults. In the Christian era, typified
by St. Augustine's condemnation of Cybele and her mutilating sac-
rificial rites, the prostitute remains our point of contact with re-
pressed pagan nature. We completely lack the fusion of sexual and
sacred found in Hinduism, notably the Tantric school, where ini-
tiation in erotic arts by a sexually experienced woman is considered
a form of spiritual instruction. Christianity splits woman into divided
halves: Mary, the Holy Mother, and Mary Magdalene, the whore.
Maternity and sexuality don't mix well in our tradition, with its
transcendent, earth-shunning deity. In the Madonna-whore com-
plex, which particularly affects Latin Catholics (e.g., Frank Sinatra),
a man loses sexual interest in his wife when she becomes pregnant,
activating memories of his sainted mother. The home becomes a
shrine, and the man seeks sexual satisfaction elsewhere with whores,
"bimbos," defensively minimized to evade woman's hegemony.

When they posit prostitutes as lost souls to be saved from satanic
male clutches, feminists are collaborating in the systematic deni-
gration of a class of women who, under dangerous conditions,
perform a necessary social service. Governments that try to ban
prostitution never succeed for long. Prostitution is always reinvented
and flourishes, underground or in light of day. During the Sixties
sexual revolution, I believed that, in a reformed future, prostitution
would be unnecessary, since emancipated female desire would ex-
pand to meet men's needs. However, over time, I realized that
sexuality can never be fully contained within social forms and that
the old double standard was no misogynous fiction: promiscuity is
risky to the health of procreative woman and her fetus. Hence the
prostitute has come to symbolize for me the ultimate liberated

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59

woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no
one.

Often over the past decade, as I arrive at 8 a.m. at my classroom
building on South Broad Street in Center City, I have been stunned
to encounter a working whore sashaying cheerfully along in full
brazen regalia — red-leather bolero jacket and bulging halter, white-
leather or lavender-suede thigh-high boots, black-spangle or gold-
lame micro-miniskirt with no underwear and bare buttocks. White,
black, or Latina, she dominates the street for two blocks in every
direction. You can see the stir, as people hurrying to work break
step, turn, or furtively stare. Working-class men brashly hail her in
humorous admiration; middle-class men are startled, embarrassed,
but fascinated; middle-class women, uneasily clutching their attache
cases, are frozen, blank, hostile.

Of the great sexual personae I have seen in my lifetime, Phil-
adelphia prostitutes rank very high. They are fearless and aggressive,
waving down businessmen in sedans or bringing traffic to a halt as
they jaw with taxi drivers. They rule the street. "Pagan goddess!"
I want to call out, as I sidle reverently by. Not only are these women
not victims, they are among the strongest and most formidable
women on the planet. They exist in the harshest reality, but they
laugh and bring beauty out of it. For me, they are heroines of outlaw
individualism.

Prostitution should be decriminalized. My libertarian position
is that government may not under any circumstances intervene in
consensual private behavior. Thus, despite their damage to my gen-
eration, I support the legalization of drugs, consistent with current
regulation of alcohol. And I would argue for the absolute right to
homosexual sodomy. It is reasonable, however, to ask that sex acts
remain private and that they not visibly occur in shared public spaces
like streets and parks — the latter a favorite haunt of gay men, to
the despair of neighbors. Neither Judeo-Christian nor pagan may
dominate common ground.

Solicitation for sex should be tolerated and treated exactly like
the vending of any commercial product: that is, pedestrians have
the right not to be crowded, touched, or fondled by salesmen, ped-
dlers, or whores. Police may keep building entrances unobstructed,

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guarantee a clear zone around schools and churches, and control
noisy late-night auto traffic cruising in residential neighborhoods.
But harassment of whores and their clients must cease. Government
should concern itself only with public health matters: hence free
testing and treatment of venereal disease, without censoriousness,
should be required of prostitutes working in licensed brothels.

Mainstream feminist propaganda claims that prostitutes must
"do whatever men want." This is true only of the amateurish and
weak-willed. Most professional prostitutes are in complete charge of
the erotic encounter and do nothing they don't want. Things can
certainly go wrong, with painful or fatal results — as is also the
experience of gay men, whose sexual adventurousness over the cen-
turies has often cost them their lives. Stranger sex will never be risk-
free; it is just as challenging an exploration of hazardous nature
as cliff-climbing, sailing, car racing, big-game hunting, bungee-
jumping, hang-gliding, or parachuting. The thrill is partly due to
the nearness of disaster or death.

The prostitutes on window display in Amsterdam's famous red-
light district, with their opulent fleshiness, earthy practicality, and
bawdy sang-froid, impressed me enormously when I first saw them
in 1969, as a graduate student still optimistic about bringing so-
phisticated European sexual values to puritan America. By 1993,
when I visited Amsterdam again, the scene had changed: it is now
less homey and, influenced by the dance revolution in stripping,
more theatrical. The whores are dazzlingly multicultural. A con-
ventional feminist analysis would see these women writhing and
beckoning in glass cubicles as degradingly accessible cream pastries
in a male automat. But I see, as always, pure female power. The
men shopping in the street cluster together to bolster their confi-
dence; most are awkward, uncertain, abashed. The young, lithe
Thai whores boldly flaunt their breasts and buttocks in skinny
white bikinis, blazing under violet Day-glo light. They are a pagan
epiphany, apparitions of supreme sexual beauty. Jerusalem has
never vanquished Babylon.

A luminous moment of this kind occurred in Naples in 1984,
when I was walking with family friends near the bay late at night.
A tall, striking, raven-haired whore in a tight white dress, who may
or may not have been a transvestite, was bantering with a truck

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61

driver, her long leg perched raffishly on the running board. Spotting
the flowing red hair of a mature married woman in our party, she
grinned wickedly and yelled out, in a rich, gravelly, flirtatious voice,
"Ciao, rossa!" ("Hey, redhead!") Everyone stared stonily ahead and
kept moving. The group as a whole, with its middle-class American
propriety, was not as powerful as this one extraordinary being, whose
perverse, worldly consciousness seemed to take in and dominate the
entire waterfront. This was her territory; we were the intruders.
Lagging behind, I smiled conspiratorially and nodded back in hom-
age. She was my confederate. Her humor and vitality were like those
of Caravaggio's lewd urchins. I had an eerie sense of the Neapolitan
side of my heritage (my father's people were from the inland towns
of Benevento, Avellino, and Caserta), the stream of sensuality and
decadence going back to Pompeii and ancient Capri, where the
emperor Tiberius had his villa.

Strippers are not prostitutes, as they firmly point out. I first
became aware of their free-lance lifestyle while I was teaching at
Bennington in the Seventies, when several of my women students
earned tuition money by dancing in topless bars in metropolitan
New York and New Jersey. I questioned them closely and read their
research projects compiling interviews with their fellow workers. The
other dancers were often enterprising single mothers whose expe-
riences depended on the quality of the clubs, the best of which
protected women employees by escorting them to their cars and
squelching overeager customers. At worst, the dancers had to fight
off the managers themselves, but this was usually considered an
occupational hazard that plucky women could handle.

Why do so many men want to see women undress? I have written
about the pagan origins of striptease, the ritual unveiling of a body
that will always remain mysterious because of the inner darkness of
the womb, from which we all came. Sexual exhibitionism plays a
part in most nature cults, such as Hinduism. My interest in this
subject dates from a New York State Fair in Syracuse in the late
Fifties, when I was around ten. A midway barker introduced a belly
dancer, who undulated from a tent and struck a pose at one end of
the platform. A trance came over me. I bolted from my startled
family and darted through the dense male crowd to stare up at her
in stupefied wonder. My parents told the story for years, since the

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dancer, used to women giving her a wide berth, eyed me back with
alarmed perplexity. I'm sure I looked like a moron, with mouth
agape and eyes like saucers.

Sexual dancing, which handsome boys also do for gay men, is
a great art form with ancient roots. I reject feminist cant about the
"male gaze," which supposedly renders passive and inert everything
it touches. As I maintained in my first book, sexual objectification
is characteristically human and indistinguishable from the art im-
pulse. There is nothing degrading in the display of any part of the
human body. Those embarrassed or offended by erotic dancing are
the ones with the problem: their natural responses have been cur-
tailed by ideology, religious or feminist. The early Christian church
forbade dancing because of its pagan associations and its very real
incitement to lust.

In modern times, dance has become progressively more sexually
explicit, as the performers of classical ballet, once aristocrats of the
ancien regime, shed clothing from the nineteenth century on. The calf-
length ballerina's skirt, for example, became the tutu, just a fringe
of chiffon at the hips. The molded Renaissance tights of male dancers
accent bulging genitals and buttocks. Half the appeal of today's
classical ballet productions, I would argue, is their ravishing semi-
nudity. It's striptease in the name of high art. Modern dance, from
the Greek-inspired free movement and bare feet of Isadora Duncan
to the tribal pelvic thrusts and spasmodic contractions of Martha
Graham, has always been sexually revolutionary. Jazz dancing is
also boldly erotic, thanks to Bob Fosse's appropriation of burlesque
moves, which he witnessed as a child in the demimondaine.

Since the Twenties, popular dance has been sexualized by wave
after wave of African and Latin (really Afro-Caribbean) influences.
As Eldridge Cleaver said in Soul on Ice, the 1960 twist craze activated
the dead white pelvis, in an early skirmish of the sexual revolution.
Grinding, provocative wiggles and shimmies are now the everyday
recreational language of the white middle class. The line between
striptease and respectable social dancing has blurred. Hence the
recent evolution toward total nudity in topless clubs. Today, straight
or gay men, tucking tribute bills into a woman's garter belt or a
guy's motorcycle boot, can inspect the sexual terrain at microscopic

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63

proximity. Unescorted female customers are still disappointingly
rare, as I can report from my own midnight forays.

In virtually all venues, the nude dancer is in total control of the
stage and audience. The feminist scenario of a meat rack of ribs and
haunches priced and fingered by reeking buffoons is another hys-
terical projection. Hard as it may be to believe, men in strip clubs
admire what they see and are even awed by it. They gather round
the women to warm themselves, as if the stage were a bonfire on a
medieval winter's night. The dancers exert a magnetic force. The
men don't know exactly why they must come there, but they sense
that their ordinary lives and official religion don't fulfill their longings
or answer all their questions. To reduce these ritual visitations to a
matter of mechanical masturbation is unintelligent and unimagin-
ative. The nude dancer can never be captured or completely known.
She teases and eludes, like the female principle itself.

Extreme forms of sexual expression can only be understood
through a sympathetic study of pornography, one of the most con-
troversial issues in feminism. For more than fifteen years, the syllabi
and reserve reading shelves of women's studies courses have been
dominated by two sex-killing styles, the anti-art puritanism of the
Catharine MacKinnon school and the word-obsessed, labyrinthine
abstraction of Lacanian analysis. The pro-sex wing of feminism was
virtually invisible until very recently, for two reasons. First, its ad-
herents outside academe wrote fiction or journalism and never pro-
duced major theoretical statements anywhere near MacKinnon's
level of argument. Second, its adherents inside academe shut them-
selves off in jargon-spouting conferences, which had no cultural im-
pact or purpose beyond personal careerism. Free-speech feminists
mobilized to defeat MacKinnon-inspired anti-porn statutes in Min-
neapolis and Indianapolis but then fell back into torpor, abandoning
academe to the virulent ideologues, who seized administrative power
in campus-life issues.

The pro-sex feminists were never able to stop MacKinnon,
whose reputation rose steadily until she was canonized in a dis-
gracefully uncritical cover story of The New York Times Magazine in
October 1991. During the Clarence Thomas hearings that year, she
was everywhere in the media. Even public radio and television were

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hopelessly biased, trotting out dozens of radical and establishment
feminists pushing one party line. The sexual harassment crisis was
the Waterloo of the pro-sex feminists, who lost all perspective and
collapsed into rampant MacKinnonism. Not one leading feminist
voice but mine challenged the sentimental Anita Hill groupthink or
the creeping fascism of the date-rape and sexual harassment hysteria.
Nor did any critique of MacKinnon gain ground until I called her
a "totalitarian" and exposed the drastically limited assumptions in
her cultural worldview. In late 1993, the free-speech feminists fi-
nally — and far too late — launched a searing personal attack on
MacKinnon (over her gross exploitation of the Bosnian rapes) in
central feminist territory, Ms. magazine.

My skepticism about the courage and sincerity of the pro-sex
feminists was confirmed by my own experience with them. The
refusal or inability of the academic feminists to engage my work has
eloquently demonstrated their insularity and hypocrisy. Of the best-
known names outside academe, only film director Monika Treut and
performance artist Annie Sprinkle took an interest in or publicly
supported me and my views. Treut's avant-garde thinking was
shaped by the greater cosmopolitanism of Europe, while Sprinkle's
iconoclastic comedy draws on her intimate knowledge of the worlds
of prostitution and stripping, which I celebrate. The parochialism
and conventionalism in even the most ostensibly radical feminist
views of sexuality were shown by Pat Califia's long silence about
and then open attack on me, as well as by Susie Bright's catty
impugning of my positions and right to speak. The latter's cliquish
removal from the general culture was evident in her public dismissal
of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, whose contributions to sex education of
the American mass audience have been enormous.

A major problem with pro-sex feminism has been its failure to
embrace the men's magazines, without which no theory of sexuality
will ever be complete. I have gone out of my way to publish in and
endorse Playboy and Penthouse, which have been vilified by both main-
stream and anti-porn feminists, as well as by mainstream members
of NOW. I love the irony of bringing contemporary feminism full
circle, back to where Gloria Steinem made her name by infiltrating
a Playboy Club. In the Eighties, feminists and religious conservatives
pressured convenience stores and drugstore chains to ban the men's

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65

magazines. This has led to a massive cultural ignorance on the part
of feminists, inside and outside academe, about what is actually in
those magazines.

Idiotic statements like "Pornography degrades women" or "Por-
nography is the subordination of women" are only credible if you
never look at pornography. Preachers, senators, and feminist zealots
carry on about materials they have no direct contact with. They
usually rely on a few selectively culled inflammatory examples that
bear little resemblance to the porn market as a whole. Most por-
nography shows women in as many dominant as subordinate pos-
tures, with the latter usually steamily consensual. Specialty mail
services can provide nonconsensual sadomasochistic scenarios, but
they are difficult to find, except in the vast underground of cartoon
art, so subversively individualistic that it has thus far escaped the
feminist thought police. Cartoons in R. Crumb's fabled Sixties style
show the comic, raging id uncensored. Despite hundreds of studies,
the cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence
has never been satisfactorily proved. Pornography is a self-enclosed
world of pure imagination. Feminist claims that porn actresses are
coerced and abused are wildly exaggerated and usually based on
one or two atypical tales.

Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gi-
gantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would
bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography
is by definition the subordination of women. I have learned an
enormous amount from gay porn, which a few lesbians have com-
mendabiy tried to imitate but not with sterling success. The greatest
erotic images of women remain those created by male artists and
photographers, from Botticelli, Titian, Ingres, and Courbet to Rich-
ard Avedon and Helmut Newton. The advertising pages of gay
newspapers are adorned with stunning icons of gorgeous male nudes,
for which I have yet to see an impressive lesbian equivalent. Men,
gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women
are forever softening, censoring, politicizing.

Unlike the art-illiterate anti-porn fanatics, gay men glory in
every angle on the sexual body, no matter how contorted. A sleek,
pretty boy in cowboy boots spreading his buttocks for an up-close
glimpse of his pink anus is an alluring staple of gay magazines. In

VAMPS & TRAMPS

that world, everyone knows this splendid creature is victor, not slave.
Sexual power defies or reverses rigid political categories. Feminists
who see the bare-all, pubic "beaver shot'* as a paradigm of women's
historical oppression are cursed with the burden of their own pe-
destrian prejudices. Until we solve the mystery of sexuality, contem-
plation of our kaleidoscopic genitalia — from glossy and nubile to
lank and withered — will remain an interesting and important ex-
ercise in human self-discovery.

Since paganism must give its due to Judeo-Christianity, we
should respect the desire of the religious not to be assaulted with
nude images in public spaces. Thus sex magazines should be freely
available at newsstands but not necessarily displayed on them.
Sealed plastic or paper sleeves don't seem unreasonable to me,
though I would like opponents and proponents of pornography to
be able to leaf through magazines to stay informed. Since television
is also a public space, it is fair to ask, but not require, that stations
schedule adult programming during late-night hours, when parents
can best supervise their children. Unlike Frank Zappa, I feel that
a ratings system is merely informational and infringes on no one's
right to free speech. On the contrary, an "X" designation positively
helps the lascivious to locate juicy material in every medium. The
music industry must not confuse free speech rights with lucrative
placement of product in suburban malls.

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest
truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer. No one can claim
to be an expert in gender studies who is uncomfortable with por-
nography, which focuses on our primal identity, our rude and crude
animality. Porn dreams of eternal fires of desire, without fatigue,
incapacity, aging, or death. What feminists denounce as woman's
humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to
high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has be-
come a bountiful fruit tree and where growth and harvest are si-
multaneous. "Dirt" is contamination to the Christian but fertile loam
to the pagan. The most squalid images in porn are shock devices to
break down bourgeois norms of decorum, reserve, and tidiness. The
Dionysian body fluids, fully released to coat every gleaming surface,
return us to the full-body sensuality of the infant condition. In
crowded orgy tableaux, like those on Hindu temples, matter and

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e-7

energy melt. In the cave spaces of porn, camera lights are torches
of the Eleusinian Mysteries, giving us flashes of nature's secrets.

Gay men appreciate pornography as I do because they accept
the Hellenic principle that some people are born more beautiful than
others. Generic granola feminists are likely to call this "lookism" —
an offense against equality. I take the Wildean view that equality
is a moral imperative in politics but that the arts will always be
governed by the elitism of talent and the tyranny of appearance.
Pornography's total exposure of ripe flesh, its dynamic of vigor and
vitality, is animated by the cruel pre-Christian idolatry of beauty
and strength.

Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dis-
sonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess. Modern
middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won
professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a
young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given
her power, and we must welcome it. Pornography forces a radical
reassessment of sexual value, nature's bequest and our tarnished
treasure.

5. REBEL LOVE: HOMOSEXUALITY

Homosexuality may be the key to understanding the whole of
human sexuality. No subject cuts in so many directions into psy-
chology, sociology, history, and morality. The incidence, as well as
visibility, of homosexuality has certainly increased in the Western
world in the past twenty-five years. But discussion of it rapidly
became overpoliticized after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, which
began the gay liberation movement. Viewpoints polarized: people
were labeled pro-gay or anti-gay, with little room in between. For
the past decade, the situation has been out of control: responsible
scholarship is impossible when rational discourse is being policed
by storm troopers, in this case gay activists, who have the absolutism
of all fanatics in claiming sole access to the truth.

Stonewall was an act of resistance to police authority by multi-
racial drag queens mourning the death of Judy Garland, long div-
inized by gays. Therefore Stonewall had a cultural meaning beyond
the political: it was a pagan insurrection by the reborn transvestite

VAM PS & TRAMPS

priests of Cybele. But the Seventies gay scene immediately turned
away from the drag spirit that gave birth to it: a macho clone look
took over the men's bars, and queens were scorned as an embar-
rassing reminder of a time when gayness meant effeminacy. Para-
doxically, drag was more acceptable in heterosexual rock music,
then in its decadent sci-fi phase, typified by Alice Cooper, Kiss, and
David Bowie, whose roots, via the New York Dolls, were in Andy
Warhol's charismatic Superstars, whom I worshiped.

From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short
years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the
horror of AIDS turned gay activists into rampaging nihilists and
monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the govern-
ment and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose
errors of judgment materially aided the rise and consolidation of the
far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result
of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the
best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily
by gay men. In the West, despite much propaganda to the contrary,
AIDS is a gay disease and will remain one for the foreseeable future.

That is, of all those stricken with AIDS throughout the world —
whether through drug use, blood transfusion, or prenatal or het-
erosexual transmission — no other group has experienced it so
uniquely as a collective spiritual crisis or as a traumatic assault upon
personal identity. The newness of the disease, the long delay of
symptoms after infection, the rapid speed of degeneration (syphilis
could take a lifetime) were shocking. Medicine and science had
become so advanced that gay men, heady after Stonewall, were
caught up in the arrogant Western confidence in free will and self-
determination. And without the fear of pregnancy that hovers over
heterosexual liaisons, homosexuality had no inherent biological con-
trols; its use of the body seemed unlimited. Came the apocalypse:
AIDS is a systems breakdown of a body that has lost its defenses
against nature. The ugliness and premature aging of this wasting
disease were especially painful and grotesque in view of gay men's
historic idealization of youth and beauty.

The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world
was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman
empire. Its joyful, perilous excess was a response to the long suppres-

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69

sion of homosexual behavior and expression following the trial and
conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Wilde, a Hellenophile, was to
relapse into Christian morality in prison, but his uncompromising
aestheticism lingered on in the underground sensibility of gay men,
right up to Stonewall. The masculine cultism of the Seventies bar
scene was laudable in view of feminism's bitter assault on the very
notion of masculinity, building at that moment. However, ancient
Greek idealizations of the athletic male form were always grounded
in a larger context of both aesthetics and religion. And, it must be
remembered, Athenian boy-lovers always married and never stopped
honoring female divinities.

The twentieth century has seen two holocausts — one by politics
and one by nature. The massacre of gay men has had and will
continue to have devastating consequences in the worlds of art and
fashion, where gays have exercised enormous, often invisible influ-
ence as tastemakers. But the destruction began from within. I believe
that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly
due to their Seventies delusionalism that a world without women
was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally
tore the body apart.

When he refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, Hippolytus was de-
stroyed — dragged to death by his own horses (i.e., sexual impulses),
spooked by a chthonian monster from the sea. No eroticism can be
complete that denies the power of the female principle, which is
nature itself, what Hinduism calls the cycle of birth and death. Pre-
Stonewall gay culture was complete. Not only did lesbians and gay
men, due to the paucity of gay bars, socialize more regularly, but
gay men were bound together by a grandiose international aesthetic
that spectacularly glamourized women — chiefly Hollywood stars
and opera divas (recently documented by Wayne Koestenbaum).
Female impersonation, as campy nightclub entertainment, flour-
ished. For centuries, gay aesthetes — the brilliant makeup artists,
hair stylists, and couturiers — have shaped and enhanced women's
sexual image. They accurately saw and hugely increased women's
power over men — even as they refused to yield to it in their personal
erotic lives.

The post-Stonewall decade, rejecting drag queens and closing
the doors of the orgiastic men's bars to women, created a paradise

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of pleasure that collapsed into the hell of AIDS. Is obsessive mono-
sexuality really a solution to the libidinal limitations of socially en-
forced heterosexuality? A gay versus straight opposition simply
perpetuates a false dualism and guarantees the oppression of gay
men, who will always lose that conflict and, because of their vul-
nerability when cruising, will pay with their blood in the streets.
Surely the real revolution is to establish the fluid continuum of
human sexuality and to win acceptance from heterosexuals of the
presence of pleasure-promising homosexual impulses in themselves.

The gay activist establishment has been stupid and narrow in
the way it has conducted its civil rights campaign. An authentically
Sixties libertarian vision would argue for the protection of all non-
conformist behavior, to which homosexual love is just a subset. There
is no gay leader remotely near the stature of Martin Luther King,
because black activism has drawn on the profound spiritual tradi-
tions of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly
hostile. Activists have disrupted church services in New York and
Philadelphia (flinging the Communion host on the floor; throwing
condoms at and striking the archbishop conducting a Mass for the
AIDS dead). Shrilly self-interested and doctrinaire, gay activism is
completely lacking in philosophical perspective. Its sorrow became
the only sorrow, its disease the only disease.

The parallel claimed by gay leaders between blacks and gays
as oppressed minorities has always been questionable, and some
African-Americans have angrily rejected it. Since the argument that
gays are a distinct class, deserving special protection against dis-
crimination, is based on this premise, the controversy over issues
like Colorado's Amendment 2 (passed in 1992) is confused and
simplistic, with knee-jerk responses of outrage expected of all loyal
gays. But discrimination against skin color is not wholly comparable
to the complicated resistance of virtually all societies in history to
open homosexuality, which involves thorny questions of morality
and psychology. Most gays can "pass" whenever they want — an
option available to few blacks.

Homosexuality is not "normal." On the contrary, it is a chal-
lenge to the norm; therein rests its eternally revolutionary character.
Note I do not call it a challenge to the idea of a norm. Queer the-
orists — that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders — have tried

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"71

to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm,
since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly
bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb,
and blind to the outside world. Nature exists, whether academics
like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule.
That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction.
Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game-playing can change that
biologic fact.

However, my libertarian view, here as in regard to abortion, is
that we have not only the right but the obligation to defy nature's
tyranny. The highest human identity consists precisely in such as-
sertions of freedom against material limitation. Gays are heroes and
martyrs who have given their lives in the greatest war of them all.
Fate, not God, has given us this flesh. We have absolute claim to
our bodies and may do with them as we see fit. To develop and
expand our sensory, responses is a pagan strategy, reverent in its
own way toward nature. Homosexual potential is in everyone, and
evidence suggests that under the right circumstances it will out. But
the instinctual imperative to mate is also in all of us.

Given the intense hormonal surge of puberty, the total absence
of adult heterosexual desire is neither normal nor natural, and it
requires explanation. Gay activists are guilty of Stalinist disinfor-
mation when they assert that homosexuality is no different than and
equivalent to heterosexuality, and that anus and vagina are inter-
changeable, except for our political conditioning to the contrary.
Toleration of dissenting behavior, which I am calling for, does not
necessarily mean approval by society. Pagan and Judeo-Christian
will never, and should never, agree. Disapproval is not "ignorance"
or "bigotry" — gay activists' tiresome crutch terms — when it is mo-
tivated by principle. Similarly, there are legitimate medical questions
about the safety and sanitation of tissue-rupturing anal sex, even
though the latter belongs, in my view, to the private realm outside
government control.

Since Romanticism, sexuality has been asked to bear too much
of the burden of identity, formerly supplied by affiliation to religion,
nation, or clan. Recreational sex has expanded in importance, so
that it is now a substitute for other forms of communication. Between
intimates, who may not be capable or desirous of procreation, sex

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permits revelatory descent to primal levels of nonverbal experience.
It emotionally reawakens and heals the "family romance" of our
personal biography. Between strangers, sex can have a ritual char-
acter. It is an act of pagan homage to some archetypal reality, outside
the social frame. The reveler in pure beauty is pillager but also
devotee.

Here is where gay men have distinguished themselves. The ide-
alism of the Seventies gay bacchanalia lay in its glorification of the
masculine, which throughout history has striven to be free of female
dominance and, in the process, made the great breakthroughs in
art and technology. But as politics began to take over gay as well
as feminist discourse, psychology dropped away. When questions
ceased to be asked about the origins of homosexuality, woman was
eliminated from the picture, with disastrous consequences for men
unaccustomed to custodianship of their bodies. Homosexual exper-
imentation will naturally occur whenever social or moral barriers
are removed. Homosexual acts have been an institutionalized part
of rites of passage in some tribal cultures, but significantly only when
the warrior code of violent masculine action is present as a corrective.
Exclusive homosexual relations among adults have never been sanc-
tioned before modern times. Their recent appearance seems to me
directly connected to the crisis in sex roles after the industrial rev-
olution.

Gay men are mythmakers, poetically re-creating a masculinity
that has been culturally lost, but they are also fleeing a female power
that has become frustrated and all-consuming. Again we must re-
consider that pivotal transition from the extended to the nuclear
family, which has isolated incomplete parents with their incomplete
children. There may indeed be a genetic component predisposing
some people toward homosexuality, but social factors in childhood
play an enormous role in determining whether that tendency man-
ifests itself or not. Parents are not specifically to blame, insofar as
they themselves are affected by historical forces of disintegration.
But the family matrix is central to the sexual story.

No one is "born gay." The idea is ridiculous, but it is symp-
tomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given
instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think
what gay men are remembering is that they were born different. Here

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73

is where my personal observation may dovetail with Simon LeVay's
hypothesis, based on admittedly fragmentary evidence, about the
enlarged hypothalamus in the brains of a small group of gay men
who died of AIDS. LeVay observed that in size the gland resembled
that of women rather than heterosexual men, but whether this char-
acteristic was congenital or the effect of disease or homosexual prac-
tice itself was inconclusive.

Media reports, manipulated by gay activists, trumpeted that
LeVay, despite his careful qualifiers, had incontrovertibly estab-
lished that gay people were born that way and that moral opposition
to gayness would hence cease, since homosexuality is not a mat-
ter of choice. Censored out was the common-sense point that this
marked an astonishing return to the old idea, discarded after Stone-
wall, that gay men are like women. Lesbians and gay men are very
different, and so is the etiology of their homosexuality. Genetic fac-
tors, if they exist, are probably more likely to appear in men, because
of the complex process of hormonal masculinization of the fetus
(always initially female in form), where variations or disturbances
might occur. But we must be cautious about a theory that defines
gays as a priori incomplete men. Excessive masculinization of the
female in utero is a possible explanation for some but certainly not
most lesbianism, which seems to be primarily produced by social
pressures.

My tentative conclusions are based on a lifetime of observation
and experience in the modern sex wars. As a tomboy in the Fifties,
I questioned my own gender and had early infatuations with women
and later purely physical attractions to men, whom I dated inter-
mittently. One reason I so dislike recent gay activism is that my
self-identification as a lesbian preceded Stonewall: I was the only
openly gay person at the Yale Graduate School (1968-72), a candor
that was professionally costly. That anyone with my aggressive and
scandalous history could be called ' 'homophobic," as has repeatedly
been done, shows just how insanely Stalinist gay activism has be-
come.

As a teacher of twenty-three years, most of which were spent in
art schools, I have been struck by the rarity, not the frequency, of
homosexuality. From the start of my media career, I attacked the
much-touted activist claim that 10 percent of the population is gay —

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

which was always a distortion of Kinsey's finding that 10 percent
had had some homosexual experience over their lifetime. Tracking
my students, acquaintances, and the world in general, I guessed the
number hovered at 3 percent, and recent surveys (ranging from 1
or 2 to 4 percent) have borne this out.

The 10 percent figure, servilely repeated by the media, was pure
propaganda, and it made me, as a scholar, despise gay activists for
their unscrupulous disregard for the truth. Their fibs and fabrica-
tions continue, now about the still-fragmentary evidence for a genetic
link to homosexuality and for homosexual behavior among animals.
The incidence of the latter is enormously exaggerated, in propor-
tion to conventional procreative pairings throughout nature, and
acknowledgment is rarely made of the exceptional conditions of en-
vironmental stress or population pressure under which it occurs. I
am also unpersuaded, thus far, by multigenerational and twin studies
that claim to have found evidence for a genetic basis for homosex-
uality, since the samplings have been weakly constructed and since
homosexuality was treated as an isolated factor, without broader
consideration of family dynamics, ethnic history, or personality ty-
pology.

Because of my admiration of and deep friendship with gay men
(four of whom I have written about elsewhere in this book), I used
to feel that the old psychoanalytic model was inadequate in describ-
ing the origins of homosexuality as, essentially, arrested develop-
ment. But it was true that all my gay male friends had powerful,
dominating mothers in the prototypical style. In college, I was al-
ready complaining about my difficulties in meeting or communi-
cating with lesbians. My mental and imaginative life was absorbed
more and more with gay men, with whom I felt totally free. To this
day, the dichotomy remains. I have found few lesbians with whom
I can discourse for more than five minutes without hitting some
tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology. My romantic life has
been spent primarily with bisexual or heterosexual women. I fail to
see why lesbians must pursue other lesbians; it's illogical. Straight
women, with their radiant sexual aura, began it all.

Again and again over the decades, as I did my time, in frustrated
boredom, in lesbian bars, trying with spectacular lack of success to
make friends or just converse, I would end up gabbing for hours

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75

with some stray gay man. He might have dropped out of school at
fourteen, but he had opinions, tastes, energy, wit. Is there something
innately different about the gay male brain? And do family factors
and gay culture reinforce that difference? Answers will not soon be
coming. But what I do know is that gay male consciousness, as I
have experienced it, is stunningly expansive and exquisitely precise.
Gay men have collectively achieved a fusion of intellect, emotion,
and artistic sensibility that resembles Goethe's or Byron's integration
of classicism and Romanticism. The intellectual of the twenty-first
century, trained by an academic system I am trying to reshape, will
think like a gay man.

After my career in art schools, I know that artistic talent cannot
be created, only developed. It is inborn. Similarly, I conclude that
men are not born gay; they are born with an artistic gene, which
may or may not lead to an artistic career. More often, they are
connoisseurs, aesthetes, or simply arch, imperious commentators
with stringent judgments about everything. (At a Yale party, a gay
fellow whom I hardly knew muttered waspishly to me about a
woman across the room, "That dress does nothing for her!") There
are gay men without such talent, but they are a minority. The
effeminacy of gay men — which emerges as soon as the macho masks
drop — is really their artistic sensitivity and rich, vulnerable emo-
tionalism.

In Sexual Personae, I studied the psychic duality of the artist, who
combines male and female in the act of creation. It is possible that
gay men are caught midway between the male and female brains
and therefore share the best of both. Talent in the visual arts may
be related to a sensory or perceptual openness, detectable (as re-
sponsiveness to light and color) in early childhood and perhaps
related to autism, where the flux of sensations is cognitively uncon-
trolled. The gay male brain seems to me permanently switched "on."

Here is my speculative scenario, constructed after teaching and
advising so many apprentice artists. A sensitive boy is born into a
family of jocks. He is shy and dreamy from the start. His father is
uncomfortable with him, and his brothers are harsh and impatient.
But he is his mother's special favorite, almost from the moment he
is born. He and she are more alike. Repelled by male roughhousing,
he is drawn to his mother's and sisters' quietness and delicacy. He

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

becomes his mother's confidant against her prosaic husband, a half-
eroticized relationship that may last a lifetime and block the son
from adult contacts with women.

He is fascinated by his mother's rituals of the boudoir, her
hypnotic focus on the mirror as she applies magic unguents from
vials of vivid color, like paints and palette. He loves her closet, not
because he covets her clothes but because they are made of gorgeous,
sensuous fabrics, patterns, and hues denied men in this post-
aristocratic age. Later, he feels like an outsider in the schoolyard.
There is no male bonding; he tries to join in but never fully merges
with the group. Masculinity is something beautiful but "out there";
it is not in him, and he knows he is feigning it. He longs for approval
from the other boys, and his nascent sexual energies begin to flow
in that direction, pursuing what he cannot have. He will always be
hungry for and awed by the masculine, even if and when, through
bodybuilding or the leather scene, he adopts its accoutrements.

Thus homosexuality, in my view, is an adaptation, not an inborn
trait. When they claim they were gay "as far back as I can re-
member," gay men are remembering their isolation and alienation,
their differentness, which is a function of their special gifts. Such
protestations are of little value in any case, since it is unlikely that
much can be recalled before age three, when sexual orientation may
already be fixed. Heaven help the American boy born with a talent
for ballet. In this culture, he is mocked and hounded and never wins
the respect of masculine men. Yet this desperation deepens his ar-
tistic insight and expressiveness. Thus gay men create civilization
by fulfilling the pattern of Coleridge's prophesying, ostracized poet,
dancing alone with "flashing eyes" and "floating hair."

Other patterns of homosexual etiology certainly exist, including
one of hatred toward and revulsion from women. But that ambiv-
alence may already be built into the story I have sketched, since the
mother who turns away from her dull spouse to make a subliminally
incestuous marriage with her sensitive son may be suffocating the
boy and stunting his development. Indeed, the developmental theory
of homosexuality, which I rejected in college, returned to haunt me
because of the misbehavior of ACT UP, a chain of small protest
groups that I probably would have joined in my youth, since its
style of Sixties guerrilla theater is my own. ACT UP won substantial

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77

practical victories in its mobilizations against the political and med-
ical establishment, but its most crazed extremists also did enormous
damage to the public image of gay men that will take a generation
to undo.

Flashed across the nation's television screens were contorted
male faces, raging, ranting, bawling like infants — "Me, me, me!"
What we were seeing in ACT UP's worst tantrums was the disin-
tegration, under pressure of implacable reality, of the gay male per-
sona. Horrifyingly exposed were the unevolved emotions just
beneath the surface. Male authority figures — the disapproving, re-
jecting father — were blamed for everything. Total attention and an
instant cure were demanded, even though science had failed to find
a cure for any virus, even the common cold. It is no coincidence
that ACT UP never could expand its membership beyond the white
middle class, with its footstamping sense of entitlement. Civil rights
demonstrators, anti-war protesters, and those facing death from any
disease had rarely behaved with such juvenile lack of dignity.

Meanwhile, more women were dying yearly from breast cancer
than had succumbed to AIDS in America over a decade. In April
1991, a monsoon hit Bangladesh and killed 125,000 people over
one weekend — exactly the number of American AIDS casualties to
that point. I angrily asked a friend, "Where is the quilt for those
who died in Bangladesh? Who will go to Bangladesh and find those
names? What privileges the deaths of so many white middle-class
gay men?" ACT UP was selfishly selective in what it got angry
about.

The government's policy of neglect toward AIDS (not so dif-
ferent from its slow response to service-related chronic diseases and
terminal cancers among veterans) may have been preferable to the
alternative — identification and quarantine of the infected, which
some observers were demanding. Civil liberties won over the public
health, an ethically problematic choice that I, as a libertarian, sup-
ported. ACT UP's hysteria made me reconsider those vilified ther-
apists and ministers who think change of homosexual orientation is
possible and whose meetings are constantly disrupted by gay agi-
tators. Is gay identity so fragile that it cannot bear the thought that
some people may not wish to be gay? The difficulties in changing
sexual orientation do not spring from its genetic innateness. Sexuality

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is highly fluid, and reversals are theoretically possible. However,
habit is refractory, once the sensory pathways have been blazed and
deepened by repetition — a phenomenon obvious in the struggle with
obesity, smoking, alcoholism, or drug addiction.

The injustice and impracticality are in trying to "convert" to-
tally from homosexuality to heterosexuality, an opposition I think
false. However, helping gays learn how to function heterosexually,
if they so wish, is a perfectly worthy aim. We should be honest
enough to consider whether homosexuality may not indeed be a
pausing at the prepubescent stage when children anxiously band
together by gender. Indeed, the instantly recognizable house voice
of many gay men — thin, reedy, and pinched — dates from that pre-
adult period. But artistic creativity is also a prolonged childhood,
as the Romantics first observed. Hence the eternal youthfulness of
gay men, their inquisitiveness and joie de vivre, so different from the
plodding earnestness of lesbians, laboring in yokes of political cor-
rectness. When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a
spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem in-
capable of.

A pagan design for living would be a sexual mosaic, a high-
contrast Greek-key meander pattern. Gay men should confront the
elements of haphazard choice in their erotic history, which began
in the confusion, shame, and inarticulateness of childhood. Judeo-
Christian morality, following the Bible, would call for a renunciation
of all homosexual behavior. I don't agree. Why shouldn't all avenues
of pleasure remain open? But it is worthwhile for gays to retrace
their developmental steps and, if possible, to investigate and resolve
the burden of love-hate they still carry for the opposite-sex parent.
Behavior may not change, but self-knowledge — Socrates' motto —
is a philosophic value in its own right.

If a gay man wants to marry and sire children, why should he
be harassed by gay activists accusing him of "self-hatred"? He is
more mature than they are, for he knows woman's power cannot be
ignored. And if a married man wants to pursue beautiful young men
from time to time, why shouldn't he have the same freedom of sexual
self-determination as husbands who patronize whores? Why must
he be charged with vacillation or evasion, when his eroticism is the
most fully developed? If counseling can allow a gay man to respond

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sexually to women, it should be encouraged and applauded, not
strafed by gay artillery fire of reverse moralism. Heterosexual love,
as Hindu symbolism dramatizes, is in sync with cosmic forces. Not
everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.

It is much easier for women to live bisexually, since their erotic
performance is not measured by the unforgiving yardstick of erection
and ejaculation. Men who shrink from penetration of the female
body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are re-
turning to our uncanny site of origin. Lingering on the unconscious
level in every act of heterosexual intercourse are two male terrors:
that when the penis goes in, it won't come out again; and second
that as he approaches the womb, a man will, as in a nightmare, be
sucked back to boyhood and infancy and be reabsorbed into the
maternal body.

These fantasies, detectable in the vampire legends of world my-
thology, have led me to argue that "misogyny" is one of feminism's
more useless ideas. It is not male hatred of women but male fear of
woman that is the great universal. Gay activists who spout feminist
rhetoric are actually the most misogynous, for they love the idea of
woman as victim, small, passive, and in need of their help. Such
men, of course, are usually helplessly dominated by imposing
mothers.

The sexual segregation of gay bars following Stonewall was bad
for everyone. The men slid into orgiastic narcissism, and the women
entombed themselves in a gigantic burrow, the clogged honeypot of
lesbian feminism. I got along well with pre-Stonewall butches, the
diesel dykes who had a working-class realism about life. They never
whined about the awful patriarchy; most of them liked men, and
men liked them — man to man. They were plainspoken, spunky, and
self-reliant, with simple military honor. In a crisis, they'd break a
beer bottle at the neck and vault over the table to grab a guy by
the throat. Today, vapid bourgeois niceties permeate the sorority-
house world of white lesbians, even when they doll themselves up
in black leather. (As a female ex-lover said disgustedly to me about
the San Francisco scene, "I could be more s&m in a dress!")

Now that twenty-five years have passed, it's time to admit that
lesbian feminism has produced only the ghettoization and minia-
turization of women. No great works of art or intellect have emerged

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from it. On the contrary, it has asphyxiated young women with
propaganda and stunted their talent by limiting their vision and
constricting their emotions. Women never grow from the moment
they enter the lesbian world. Hence one is deafened in bars by the
juvenile whooping and hollering of packs of lesbians greeting each
other like screeching teens arriving at a slumber party. Gay men as
a whole are far more sophisticated in demeanor. In America, gay
men brunch — where interesting conversation is a sine qua non. Gay
women are off planning the next softball match. Music in the men's
bars is pumping, pelvic, and sweatily sexual; there is an edge of
menace, a darkness or artistic ambiguity. Music in too many wom-
en's bars is bland, defanged disco, with a monotonous tick-tock beat
ideal for bad dancers. A complex Latin polyrhythm clears the floor.
Classic dance tunes, numbingly overplayed, have a chirpy, cheer-
leading, middlebrow tone.

It is woman's destiny to rule men. Not to serve them, flatter
them, or hang on them for guidance. Nor to insult them, demean
them, or stereotype them as oppressors. Gay men and artists create
a realm marked off from woman's power, but most men require
women to center them and connect them to the underworld of emo-
tional truth. When women withdraw from men, as has been done
on a massive scale in lesbian feminism, we have a cultural disaster
on our hands. In such a situation, men are divided from themselves,
and women simply fail to mature. Lesbian feminists, for all their
ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fick-
leness, parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be
seen to be believed.

One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I
realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but
heterosexual women, who know how to handle men. It began with
my disillusion with Martina Navratilova, the darling of the lesbian
world, who used to symbolize for me the athletic new militance of
my generation of feminists. Her rival, Chris Evert, was the nice
Catholic girl, the goody- two-shoes whom I loathed, since she was
everything we who were reared in the Fifties were expected to be.
However, I came to see that Chris is the stronger of the two — that
Martina has a childish streak and that that childishness is inextri-
cable from her lesbianism.

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81

At key moments in important matches, Martina would glance
up toward the stands and shrug or grin shamefacedly at Judy Nelson,
her mature blonde lover, who was nodding and clapping like a
hovering kindergarten teacher. It drove me crazy. Why did the
premier Amazon of our time need a substitute mother figure? When
things went wrong, Martina couldn't conceal her self-pity; the mask
of strength would crumble, and she'd storm around the court in a
snit. Meanwhile, Chris Evert never threw a tantrum, groused at
opponents, or blamed officials. A bad call produced a steely stare,
at most. Chris behaved like an adult, taking full responsibility for
her performance and deportment.

Classy Chris Evert is a better role model for young women than
Martina, whose hyperdeveloped masculine musculature is overcom-
pensation for her creampuff interior. The real butches are straight.
Lauren Hutton and rock star Chrissie Hynde, for example, are far
tougher chicks than k. d. lang, with her lugubrious singing style and
her passe persona of a baby-faced desexed boy (early Wayne New-
ton). Dealing with and controlling men make you stronger.

Lesbians are mournful sentimentalists, dragging around ancient
family baggage. The very worst are the sour political activists, who
look like stumpy trolls. Virginia Woolf described the type well in
clunky Doris Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway. A once-lesbian friend, now
married, declared to me that lesbians suffer from "buried rage, with
a desperate need for consolation." I see a persistent pattern among
white middle-class lesbians: they often have a decorous, passive-
aggressive mother, who uses her daughter as a proxy to act out her
secret ambivalence toward men, in the person of the never directly
confronted husband. Caretakers on the surface, lesbians are seething
with unacknowledged hostility that erupts when someone (like me)
challenges them. Freud saw hidden anger as the root of depression —
the cause, in my view, of so many lesbians' notorious humorlessness.
Imagination and creative energy are killed at their source.

Gay men inhabit the bar scene as free radicals, competitive
individualists scanning each other, preening, and scuffling for ter-
ritory. Strangers can walk off the street in any country and enter
the fray. Aggressive wit is an instrument of flirtation and seduction.
Solitary cruising and pickups do occur among lesbians, but they are
not the rule. Lesbian bars are organized in huge kinship groupings,

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which I identify as family regressions (the usual grass huts). Trying
to break into these shifting cliques could drive you mad — unless you
join one of their sports leagues. Musical beds is the name of the
game. But each person sets up the next affair before she breaks off
the last, so there is intricate overlapping, producing endless amounts
of what Alison Maddcx calls, with exasperation, "lesbian drama
from hell." Lushly eroticized push-pull emotion, rather than genital
sexuality, is the real heart of lesbianism. It's All About Mom.

Today, when a freshman has an affair with another girl, all the
campus social-welfare machinery pushes her toward declaring her-
self gay and accepting and "celebrating" it. This is a serious mistake.
I encourage bisexual experimentation, and I want a world in which
people, throughout their lives, freely cross the gender lines in love.
But it is absurd to say that one, two, or more homosexual liaisons
make you "gay" — as if lavender ink ran in your veins. Young women
are often attracted to each other during a transitional period when
they are breaking away from their parents, expanding their world-
views, and developing their personalities.

To identify these fruitful Sapphic idylls with a permanent con-
dition of homosexuality is madness, and the campus counselors who
encourage such premature conclusions should be condemned and
banished. They are preying, for their own ideological purposes, on
young people at their most vulnerable. I want to cry out to these
girls: Stop! Think! Continue to love women, but resolve your prob-
lems with men. If you expect to achieve, learn how to live in the
real world. Men must be confronted, fairly and honestly. And for
heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene.
You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your
energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progres-
sion. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, com-
fortable, and dangerous.

The hypocrisy of lesbian feminist politics is clear in the increas-
ing use among lesbians, over the past decade, of sex toys and esoteric
sex practices. Thanks to advances in industrial plastics, dildos, a
staple of ancient pornographic art, now flood what used to be called
the "marital aids" market. In the early feminist Seventies, lesbian
lovemaking was constrained by taboos: anything echoing heterosex-
ual penetration had to be avoided or disguised. By the Eighties, the

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phobic MacKinnon-Dworkin school, which identifies penetration
with violence and exploitation, was ascendant, but there were un-
dercurrents of change. Susie Bright's comic dildo rap in Monika
Treut's hit film, Virgin Machine (1988), exposed the liberal new San
Francisco attitude toward sex toys to a national feminist audience.

Here, as in Tantric yoga, we should welcome any ingenious
techniques of pleasure. But what bothers me is that the lesbian dildo
craze stubbornly avoids acknowledging its anatomy-as-destiny im-
plications. Why stop at dildos? If penetration excites, and if receptive
female genitalia are so suited to friction by penis-shaped objects,
why not go on to real penises? Dildos, used for thousands of years
around the world, have always been understood as temporary stop-
gap measures, in the absence of men. Lesbian adoption of dildos
should have been a first step toward a new bisexual awareness in
feminism. Instead, the lines were drawn more firmly. Susie Bright
used her prominence not to reconcile the sexes but to preach
"fisting," a lesbian vaginal version of the notorious (and risky) gay-
male anal practice. Without reconsideration of men as potential sex
partners, such evasive maneuvers are grotesque.

Because women have no external gauge of arousal, the erect
penis is, and will remain, the ultimate symbol of human sexual
desire. Its massive use in Hindu iconography descends from ancient
fertility cults. Any woman, gay or straight, who cannot respond to
penises or who finds them hideous or laughable (a puerile theme in
the stage acts of lesbian comedians like Robin Tyler and Lea Delaria)
has been traumatized by some early experience. She is neither com-
plete as a woman nor healthy as a person. We can no longer allow,
without protest, obsessives and neurotics to preach a mutilated
brand of feminism to trusting young women. Here is where por-
nography plays a crucial cultural role, for at its raunchiest it shows
the penis in all its fascinating erotic modalities.

Lesbians who use dildos but shun penises must start admitting
that they operate sexually not just for women but against men. Prob-
ably because of the maternal embraces of nursing and childcare, a
greater, caressing physicality is permitted among women in virtually
every culture. Thus lesbianism, with its diffuse tactility, is always
less threatening than male homosexuality, which involves legitimate
issues of manhood and masculinity. Women are biologically and

VAMPS & TRAMPS

psychologically more flexible than men, whom nature coldly confines
to a narrow instrumentality.

Sexual attraction may begin visually, but it is essentially an
animal interaction of pheromones, the hormonal sex chemicals ex-
uded in sweat and urine which act on us subliminally. Those ex-
clusively homosexual as adults are signaling an aversion to the smell
of the opposite-sex parent. For lesbians, women's sweet smell and
cushiony contours are a euphoric return to a lost maternal union.
The same smell and sensations strike gay men as cloying and claus-
trophobic. Men's sharper, testosterone-based body odor seems ag-
gressively unsettling to lesbians, who associate it with invasion of
maternal turf by a rival who is known by words rather than touch
and who represents harsh external judgment. (We did not need
Lacan to tell us about the father as "law"; it's everywhere in Western
literature from Aeschylus' Oresteia to Virginia Woolf's To the Light-
house.)

Hence the roots of male homosexuality go back further than
those of lesbianism, whose unarticulated resentment toward social
order may explain its later vulnerability to philanthropic ideology.
Lesbians, said a lesbian friend wearily to me, are "program heads":
"They need the structure. They have all the answers." Hence les-
bians' omnipresence in the social-welfare industry. Rejecting the
father's competitive system, they substitute another that they imag-
ine is based on female "caring" and "compassion" but is, in dismal
effect, repressive, totalitarian, and hostile to art and dissent. The
same friend memorably said to me long ago that lesbianism is caused
by either "too much tit or not enough."

The case of lesbianism demonstrates that sexual desire, which
has moved to the foreground of modern life and dominates our pagan
popular culture, now incorporates many longings that are beyond
the physical. Visiting the elite schools on my lecture jaunts, I am
struck by how the most militantly gay, Foucault-addled male stu-
dents look like orphans, with 12-year-old Huck Finn clothing styles
and haunted, starved eyes. They are spiritually unfathered. My
friends Robert Caserio and Kristoffer Jacobson call them "lesboy-
ans" — scrubbed, arrogant clones with bright, shallow smiles who
mouth political cliches but whose sexual imaginations are completely

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85

undeveloped. Gaserio says, "Queer theory insulates them from real-
ity." This is one reason why gay studies, in its current separatist
form, must be opposed. Cultivated, cosmopolitan, pre-Stonewall gay
men like Gore Vidal were the real revolutionaries. They lived in the
world and accepted and advanced cultural history, the heritage of
gay and straight alike.

The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be
fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the
dictates not of "bigoted" society or religion but of procreative nature.
All of us emerge from the body of a mystical female giant. Boys are
swamped in the female realm. Note how mothers take male children
into the women's toilets: the boys are officially neuter and still part
of the mother's body. To progress into manhood, boys must leave
the women's world behind. In tribal cultures, men may kidnap a
boy, slash his body with knives, throw him into a pit, or abandon
him in the woods, cruel rites of passage still evident in the brutal,
sometimes homicidal hazing of modern fraternities, which flourishes
despite every effort to ban it. How many women students fall to
their death while walking, drunk, on a balcony railing during Florida
spring fling, or drown, stunned by a rock, when they dive off a cliff
into a quarry at midnight? — an actual incident at Bennington, which
killed one of my most attractive male students. Testing is integral
to masculine development. The old epithets "mama's boy" and
"sissy" (i.e., "sister") still harbor psychological truth.

At the transition to manhood, most boys pass through a
homophobic stage, where "gay" is a term of contempt (applied
indiscriminately today to anything uncool) and where recreational
gaybashing may be a criminal means of group self-affirmation. Be-
cause boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be a man
is to be not female. Contemporary feminism called this "misogyny,"
but it was wrong. Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In
the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the mod-
ern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male
ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests
of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong.
Inspired by my Italian heritage, with its blazingly assertive personae,
I call for strong men and strong women, not strong women and

VAMPS & TRAM PS

castrated men. Hot sex and healthy children cannot be produced
by eunuchs. Women, the stronger sex from birth to death, better
get their priorities straight. Male swagger is erotic.

Unfortunately for the gay cause, hostility toward, or discomfort
with, male homosexuality is built into this dynamic. Paradoxically,
gay men themselves understand the arrogant imperviousness of het-
erosexual masculinity, since its steely forms dominate their erotic
iconography. Male homosexuality may therefore be inherently
tragic, for it posits as glamourous perfection precisely what most
loathes it and cancels it out. From this agonizing and irresolvable
contradiction came some of our greatest art, such as that of Dona-
tello, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. When feminism tries to eliminate
or severely revise historical standards of masculinity without hon-
oring what they have stood for, both men and women drift farther
from secure identity. That the masculine, which exists only in mo-
ments of assertion, is condemned to transience does not diminish its
beauty or glory as an ideal.

Gay activism has been naive in its belligerent confidence that
"homophobia" will eventually disappear, with proper "education"
of the benighted. Reeducation of fractious young boys on the scale
required would mean fascist obliteration of all individual freedoms.
Furthermore, no truly masculine father will ever welcome a feminine
or artistic son at the start, since the son's lack of virility not only
threatens but liquidates that father's identity, dissolving husband
into wife. Later there may be public rituals of acceptance, but the
damage will already have been done. Gay men are aliens, cursed
and gifted, the shamans of our time.

Gays must demand not to be physically harassed, but they have
no more claim to legal protection than any other group of citizens,
large or small. I oppose the concept of "hate crimes": as a libertarian,
I am suspicious of government inquiries into psychological moti-
vation, except when fixing length of sentence after criminal convic-
tion. Democracies should not be burdened with excess legislation,
and Big Brother should stay out of our souls. "Hate crimes," cur-
rently applied on sometimes shaky evidence to racial, ethnic, or
sexual incidents, would also describe the feuding of Hatfields and
McCoys, the shootouts of urban street gangs, rioting among British
soccer fans, or any violent dispute among family members or neigh-

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bors. Why wasn't it a hate crime when two brothers shotgunned
their affluent parents while watching TV, or when a woman severed
her sleeping husband's penis, or when a skater tried to cripple her
rival? The term has simply become a stalking horse for sentimental
liberalism and should be dropped.

The worst misjudgments of gay activism were on view during
its botched campaign to end the ban on gays in the military. Before
and after the inauguration of Bill Clinton, a pontificating parade of
self-appointed gay leaders marshaled a series of men and women
whose military service had been terminated because of homosex-
uality. My position is that no institution may control what one does
in one's free time and that gays therefore have every right to join
and be promoted in the military. But gay activists, in pushing their
agenda, told lie after lie. The television camera was not kind to the
gay leaders or their martyred male servicemen. The former seemed
shifty and weasely, and the latter strangely childish and undevel-
oped. Pictures of plaintiff gay soldiers with big, frightened, rabbity
eyes gave new life to the idea that gay men are not as masculine as
others. We were being lectured about sameness, but what we saw
was difference. The gay establishment, cocooned in conceit, never
caught or corrected this costly public relations error.

The biggest activist lie was the claim that openly gay soldiers
would not disrupt military cohesion. Of course they would, and it
should have been admitted. But commanding officers must restore
unit discipline, at home or abroad. Again, I question special pro-
tections of gays; if they choose to reveal their sexual preference, they
are not entitled to greater consideration than anyone else. Until
America gets a more sophisticated sense of sexuality, in the decadent
European style, young heterosexual men will never serve comfort-
ably with gay men in close quarters. Hostility and rejection are
inevitable and may have to be tolerated, as long as professionalism
of the mission is maintained. Given the probable permanence of the
homophobic stage in male development, open homosexuality in the
military, even if officially permitted, will remain risky.

It is ridiculous to assert that gay men are interested only in
other gay men and would never ogle straight men in barracks show-
ers. When I heard this on TV, I burst out laughing. Anyone who
belongs to a health club knows better. Sexual tension and appraisal

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are constants, above all among gay men, who never stop cruising
everything in sight. Seduction of straight studs is a highly erotic
motif in gay porn. The problem with the gay-activist position is
that, for philosophic consistency, it should have argued for integra-
tion of male and female military quarters, like college dormitories.
Continued segregation by gender makes no sense, if the cohabitation
of gays with straights is really so benign. Everyone should be free
to ogle everyone else, as long as looks don't cross over to touch.
Similarly, everyone should be free to insult everyone else, as long
as words don't escalate into violence.

While they force themselves into public schools, demanding
curricular representation and free condom distribution (both of
which I oppose as a deformation of education), most gay activists
have shown very little courage in dealing with pedophilia, which
they dismiss as a hoary libel by religious fundamentalists. Man-boy
love is perfectly obvious in the pagan homoerotic art tradition, from
Greek sculpture to Donatello and Caravaggio and late nineteenth-
century poetry. NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love
Association) is consistently banned from gay marches and events.
The narrow political focus of gay activism prevented it from ad-
dressing larger questions about sexuality. Pedophilia, for example,
is yet another indicator of sexual difference, since it applies only to
gay men, never lesbians. By keeping NAMBLA at arm's length,
activists apparently think they can broaden their acceptability and
sell their agenda, which includes a preposterous demand for openly
gay Boy Scout leaders. (What would feminists say about grown men
dying to take pubescent Girl Scouts on hikes, sleep-overs and camp-
outs?)

Public hysteria has made objective discussion of this subject
very difficult. I was nearly lynched by a furious audience on a tele-
vision talk show in 1992, when the host asked me about my defense
of man-boy love in Sexual Personae. I have no erotic interest in chil-
dren, but I protest the thought-blocking and context-blind value
judgments inherent in automatically referring to every adult-juvenile
physical encounter as "abuse," "molestation," or "assault." There
are certainly atrocious incidents of genuine rape, which we must
condemn. But in some cases the contact is actually initiated by the
youth; in others, the relationship may be a positive one, but of course

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89

one never hears about it, since the affair doesn't end up in court.
Loaded terminology is self-defeating, since it coarsens distinctions
and prevents us from recognizing authentic abuse when it occurs.

In Sex and Destiny (1984), Germaine Greer documents the far
freer sensuous physicality of adults with children in non-Western
cultures but unfortunately stops short of my conclusions. The mo-
ment was right for a searching critique of our priggish sexual
assumptions in this area, which have been institutionalized by
a banal social-welfare bureaucracy. I have been thanked for my
views by many men, by letter and in person after lectures, be-
cause of their own adolescent liaisons with supportive adults. At
Bennington, I became aware (when Polaroid photos of a kneeling
boy's golden genitals fell out of a book) of a private connection
between a genial aging male poet and a good-looking local youth in
his early teens. It was against the law, but I saw nothing wrong
with it.

The problem is in trying to define the cutoff point, where coer-
cion is incontrovertible. Sex with an infant certainly falls into this
category. But our present age of consent is far too high and treats
adolescents as an enslaved class owned by their parents. Who is to
say whether or not a juvenile is capable of informed choice? When
does protection of children become oppression? Does anyone really
believe that Joey Buttafuoco, convicted of statutory rape of a minor
(the Long Island shark goddess, Amy Fisher), took advantage of a
helpless child? Because of the incest taboo, most people cannot admit
how the pagan conventions of Baroque putti and Valentine's Day
Cupids represent an eroticization of fleshy infant bodies. My position
on child pornography is that no images, if drawn, painted, or
sculpted, may be banned. As for the use of actual children in erotic
photographs and videos, some restriction may seem reasonable,
given our modern repugnance to child labor, but there is no easy
answer, since government is notoriously unable to discriminate among
kinds of art.

The damage from many pedophiliac encounters probably comes,
as some psychologists suggest, less from the contact itself than from
the culturally enforced stress and secrecy surrounding it. In a recent
scandal in New Jersey, a seventy-seven-year-old man was arrested
after years of visitations by droves of teenaged boys, who permitted

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mild physical liberties in exchange for money, liquor, and drugs.
Neighbors reported boys scaling the wall of the senior-citizens apart-
ment building at all hours of the night. Aside from the public dis-
turbance, why shouldn't both parties in this case be free to make
such a voluntary commercial transaction? Why shouldn't a juvenile
have the right to dispose of his body as he wishes? At this time, I
favor lowering the age of consent to fourteen.

Our hypocrisy about pedophilia has simply forced the problem
into the Third World, to which Westerners go for sun-and-sex va-
cations with underage boys. That economic exploitation will not end
until our strict Judeo-Christian position is challenged by a more
liberal pagan one. In the Anglo-American world, there is an endless
postponement of adulthood, which the Catholic Church once dated
from age seven. In pre-industrial rural life, where children went to
work young, sexual maturity was defined by internal natural pro-
cesses. We need to reexamine the way bourgeois values of profes-
sional job readiness, which have so distorted male-female relations,
have also curtailed the sexual freedom and self-determination of the
young.

Homosexuality is necessary now to heal the fissures in the Western
psyche, in this period following the industrial revolution. But is
homosexuality a permanent solution to the problems of the nuclear
family? Do we want the sexes forever divorced, in a state of perpetual
alienation? Middle-class men, neutered by office life and daunted
by feminist rhetoric, are shrinking. Lesbianism is increasing, since
anxious, unmasculine men have little to offer. Women are simply
more interesting. Male homosexuality is increasing, because mas-
culinity is in crisis and because maternal consciousness, severed from
the support network of the extended family, has become a psychotic
system, forcing the young to struggle for life against clinging parental
fantasy.

Current gay cant insists that homosexuality is "not a choice,"
that no one would choose to be gay in a homophobic society. But
there is an element of choice in all behavior, sexual or otherwise. It
takes an effort to deal with the opposite sex; it's safer with your own
kind. The issue is one of challenge versus comfort. In the modern
world, homosexuality has become a self-perpetuating lifestyle. The
more its practitioners have become preoccupied with self-definition,

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91

the less meaningful that definition is, since it is predicated on pro-
vincialism and tautology.

Homosexuality as erotic expression has to be liberated from gay
activism, which systematically oversimplifies issues or evades their
implications. Instead of arguing for legal recognition of gay mar-
riages, for example, it should have attacked the favored economic
status given to marriage at all, a position more consistent with
antibourgeois Sixties radicalism. Ceremonies of commitment do fill
a psychological need and bind the larger community together;
domestic-partner legislation benefits heterosexuals as well. But if
gay marriages are permitted (a prerogative of the most decadent
Roman emperors), why not polygamy? — a pagan and early Hebrew
practice later banned by Judeo-Christianity. We should also beware
of the potentially pernicious intermingling of gay activism with sci-
ence, which produces more propaganda than truth. Gay scientists
must be scientists first, gays second.

Midway through the AIDS epidemic, the media, having ignored
homosexuality or treated it in a lurid manner, did a quick flip-flop
under activist pressure and now continues its policy of unthinking
cant by parroting the gay-establishment party line on every occa-
sion. Like Elizabethan Papists or seventeenth-century French Jes-
uits, gay activists have earned a reputation as conspirators and
casuists, because of their amoral tactics of deceit, defamation, intim-
idation, and extortion. By politicizing homosexuality and isolating
it from the continuum of human life, they have managed to make
it pathological again.

Policed by gay censors, the cultural debate over homosexuality
has been stifled, to the spiritual detriment of gays themselves. For
example, the Christian Fundamentalist charge that AIDS is "God's
punishment" was summarily rejected twenty years ago and never
adequately dealt with, so that it remains, unanswered and alive as
ever. There was a cause and effect connection between promiscuity
and the epidemic, as well as an "Apres moi, le deluge" attitude on
the part of many gays. Self-questioning is crucial.

The conservative moral argument, positing a guilt that had to
be expiated, was closer to the truth than the left's callow shunting
off of blame onto negligent social authorities. The gay activist ob-
session with condom distribution (as if condoms were 100 percent

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effective) is a displacement of anxiety from the real horror of AIDS:
that men are carrying poisoned semen in their scrotums. As in the
Theban plague of Oedipus Rex, there is a blight on the seed: the heart
of nature has been contaminated. If we reject the extreme Christian
reading of the epidemic, as I do, then we must offer new metaphors,
a mythopoetic pagan alternative. Our inner turbulence must be
acknowledged and addressed. In the collective unconscious, gay and
straight suffer together.

6. conclusion: citizens of the empire

As America's pagan popular culture expands around the world,
and as multicultural influences flow back and are absorbed by us
in turn, we have re-created the polyglot complexity of the Roman
empire at its height. We should accept the imperial model of moral
dichotomy, the state of perpetual tension between the sober virtues
of the republican past and the luxury and decadence of the present.
Opposition, rather than approval, produces the sculptural carving
out of selfhood.

Creative duality is my master principle. We must belong simul-
taneously to the mainstream culture and to our ever-receding ethnic
origins. Imperialism may begin as a system of unilateral domination,
but it ends as artistic and intellectual cosmopolitanism, revolution-
ary in its own right. In today's global existence, the alternative to
imperialism is not unconditional freedom but tribalism, fractious
and fragmented.

In sexual and racial matters, the parochial tribal entity is now
"identity politics," a barricaded secessionism that is a spiritual dead
end. Hostile respect, rather than pluralism, may be the best we can
hope for. The new extended family, no longer linked by blood, will
be both patriotic and internationalist, preserving history without
being trapped by it.

Imperial sexuality, typified by the syncretism of the Mediter-
ranean goddess cults, was grounded in both civilization and nature.
In practice, this means that while homosexuality is a brave and
necessary drive for male autonomy, gay men must render unto Cy-
bele the things that are Cybele's. And women, in rightly seizing

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93

social power, must not neglect what they owe to, and need from,
the ancient rites of phallicism.

I see the dynamic of history as an oscillation between Apollonian
and Dionysian principles, order and energy, which become, at their
extremes, fascism or chaos. In sexual terms, this promises eternal
conflict between repression and debauchery. We must learn how to
make tiny corrections to avoid the uncontrolled swing of the pen-
dulum that, over a generation, swept us from Fifties conformism to
Sixties rebellion to Seventies excess and the cataclysm of AIDS. We
now live with the smell of funeral pyres.

Dual vision allows us to hail the epochal liberation of the senses
in post-Stonewall gay culture and at the same time to acknowledge
its massive destructiveness. There has been a contemptible failure
by gay leaders to admit the slightest moral responsibility for the
enormous part the gay community played, helped by jet travel, in
the rapid spread of AIDS throughout the world. That the harm was
not intentional makes the gay role all the more tragic, in the original
Greek sense. The Stonewall victory was in many ways Pyrrhic.

The fatalism of imperial philosophy gives death a simple, secular
dignity. Life is dust to dust, without the trick ending of salvation.
Hit plays and films of the moment use mawkish Victorian senti-
mentality to present AIDS sufferers as noble victims whose only
problem is lack of acceptance and love from society. But gay men
challenged nature and lost. What is "safe sex" but a return to the
normative? — as dictated by tyrant nature. Promiscuity is a pagan
choice, but then be prepared to pay the price. Of short, intense
Romantic lives, represented in our time by gay men and rock stars,
it can be said (revising a famous motto of the American Revolution),
"Live free and die!"

My model of dualism is the drag queen, who negotiates between
sexual personae, day by day. I sometimes call my system "drag
queen feminism." Queens are "fierce," in every sense. Masters of
aggressive, bawdy speech, they know the street and its dangers and
fight it out without running to authority figures, who would hardly
be sympathetic. Queens, unlike feminists, know that woman is dom-
inatrix of the universe. They take on supernatural energy when
ritualistically donning their opulent costume, the historical regalia

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of woman's power. Prostitute and drag queen are sexual warriors
who offer a pagan challenge to bourgeois gentility, now stultifying
modern life from corporate boardrooms to academia to suburban
shopping malls.

Bisexuality is our best hope of escape from the animosities and
false polarities of the current sex wars. Whether or not we can put
it into practice, bisexuality is a great pagan ideal. Perhaps bisexual
responsiveness is all we can hope for. Indeed, that is the lesson of art
history, which exposes us to the many ravishing forms of human
beauty. The homosexual Botticelli produced, in The Birth of Venus,
one of the most sublime images of the power of woman. And Mi-
chelangelo, adorning the Sistine Chapel with twenty homoerotic
ignudi (nude Greek youths), made the most radical statement yet of
the enduring duality of pagan and Christian in our culture.

A pagan education would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and
seduce the senses. Our philosophy should be both contemplative
and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as
central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted,
and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but
perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater. In the imperial arena,
there is no law but imagination.

THE CULTURE
WARS

THE NURSERY-SCHOOL CAMPUS!
THE CORRUPTING OF THE
HUMANITIES IN THE U.S.

Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is
no. Since the decline of the great era of literary journalism, when
Edmund Wilson, the Algonquin wits, and the politically engaged
Partisan Review writers were active, America has lacked a general
literate culture hospitable to ideas. Mary McCarthy went off to Paris,
and Susan Sontag, after half-a-dozen promising years, withdrew into
French preciosity and irrelevance. When she was attacked for her
laudable interest in pop culture, Sontag dropped it like a hot potato
and has never since regained the status she enjoyed in the 1960s.

During that decade, a vital artistic and intellectual consciousness
was taking shape. Passionate, prophetic voices, heirs to the visionary
tradition of Emerson, Whitman, and Hart Crane, spoke in the central
works of Allen Ginsberg, Norman O. Brown, and Leslie Fiedler, but
they had few successors. The actual achievements of 1960s thinkers
were few and limited, and the line of continuity was broken.

America's current intellectual crisis originates in the tragic loss
of the boldest and most innovative members of the 1960s generation.
Drugs may have expanded the mind, but they arrested its long-term

[Times Literary Supplement, London, May 22, 1992]

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productivity, whose promise was glimpsed in the so-called "psy-
chedelic" phase of rock music.

The students most affected by the Sixties did not as a rule enter
the professions, whose stultifying rules for advancement have re-
mained unchanged for fifty years. Instead, they surrendered their
places to less talented contemporaries, careerists in the dull, timid
Fifties style.

Nowhere was this truer than in academia. The effect upon Amer-
ican universities of the student rebellions was fleeting. Genuine rad-
icals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped
out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion
process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The univer-
sities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now
hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated
to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.

There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerous
leftists, "tenured radicals" in Roger Kimball's phrase, who have
invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact,
they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen
in our major universities. The "multiculturalists" and the "politi-
cally correct" on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually
represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and
conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which
seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore pretend not to
notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.

The politically correct professors, with their hostility to the
"canon" of great European writers and artists, have done serious
damage to the quality of undergraduate education at the best Amer-
ican colleges and universities. Yet they are people without deep
beliefs. Real radicals stand for something and risk something; these
academics are very pampered fat cats who have never stood on
principle at any point in their careers. Nothing has happened to
them in their lives. They never went to war; they were never out of
work or broke. They have no experience or knowledge of anything
outside the university, least of all working-class life. Their politics
are a trendy tissue of sentimental fantasy and unsupported verbal
categories. Guilt over their own privilege has frozen their political

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99

discourse into a simplistic world melodrama of privilege versus dep-
rivation.

Intellectual debate in the humanities has also suffered because
of the narrowness of training of those who emerged from the over-
departmentalized and overspecialized universities of the postwar
period. The New Criticism, casting off the old historicism of German
philology, produced a generation of academics trained to think of
literature as largely detached from historical context. This was ideal
breeding ground for French theory, a Saussurean paradigm dating
from the 1940s and '50s that was already long passe when American
academics got hold of it in the early 1970s. French theory, far from
being a symbol of the 1960s, was on the contrary a useful defensive
strategy for well-positioned, pedantic professors actively resisting
the ethnic and cultural revolution of that subversive decade. Fou-
cault, a glib game-player who took very little research a very long
way, was especially attractive to literary academics in search of a
short cut to understanding world history, anthropology and political
economy.

The 1960s failed, I believe, partly because of unclear thinking
about institutions, which it portrayed in dark, conspiratorial, Kaf-
kaesque terms. The positive role of institutions in economically com-
plex societies was neglected. The vast capitalist distribution network
is so efficient in America that it is invisible to our affluent, middle-
class humanists. Capitalism's contribution to the emergence of
modern individualism, and therefore feminism, has been blindly
suppressed. This snide ahistoricism is the norm these days in wom-
en's studies programs and chi-chi, Foucault-afflicted literature de-
partments. Leftists have damaged their own cause, with whose basic
principles I as a 1960s libertarian generally agree, by their indiffer-
ence to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their unforgivable lack of
professionalism as scholars. The Sixties world-view, which inte-
grated both nature and culture, has degenerated into clamorous,
competitive special-interest groups.

The universities led the way by creating a ghetto of black studies,
which begat women's studies, which in turn begat gay studies. Not
one of these makeshift, would-be disciplines has shown itself capable
of re-creating the broad humane picture of Sixties thought. Each

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has simply made up its own rules and fostered its own selfish clien-
tele, who have created a closed system in which scholarship is in-
separable from politics. It is, indeed, questionable whether or not
the best interests of blacks, women, and gays have been served by
these political fiefdoms. The evidence about women's studies sug-
gests the opposite: that these programs have hatched the new thought
police of political correctness. No conservative presently in or out
of government has the power of intimidation wielded by these ruth-
less forces. The silencing of minority opinion has been systematic in
faculty recruitment and promotion. The winners of that rat-race
seem genuinely baffled by such charges, since, of course, their con-
ventional, fashionable opinions have never been stifled.

While lecturing at major American universities this year, I have
come into direct conflict with the politically correct establishment.
At Harvard and elsewhere I was boycotted by the feminist faculty,
and at several colleges leaflets were distributed, inaccurately de-
nouncing me as a voice of the far right. Following my lecture at
Brown, I was screamed at by soft, inexperienced, but seethingly
neurotic middle-class white girls, whose feminist party-line views on
rape I have rejected in my writings. Rational discourse is not possible
in an atmosphere of such mob derangement.

Sociologically, the roots of the campus crisis can be found in
the rapid expansion of the college-going population in America in
the decades following the Second World War. After the "baby-
boomers, " the post-war demographic bulge, passed through, colleges
were forced to retrench, and they turned to aggressive marketing
strategies to maintain enrollment. As costs continued to rise, they
were locked into a strictly commercial relationship with parents.
Intellectual matters soon took a back seat to the main issue: pro-
viding a "nice time" for students with paying parents.

By the early 1970s, American universities had become top-heavy
with full-time administrators who took to speaking of the campus
as a "community," which, faculty soon discovered, was governed
by invisible codes of acceptable speech, opinions, and behavior. In
the past fifteen years, some of these administrators, especially Stu-
dent Life deans and the freshmen orientation staff, have forged a
disquieting alliance with women's studies programs, and are indoc-
trinating their charges with the latest politically correct attitudes on

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1 Ol

dating, sexual preference, and so on. Many of the students, neglected
by their prosperous, professional parents, are pathetically grateful
for these attentions. Such coddling has led, in my view, to the out-
rageous speech codes which are designed to shield students from the
realities of life. The campus is now not an arena of ideas but a
nursery school where adulthood can be indefinitely postponed. Fac-
ulty who are committed to the great principle of free speech are
therefore at war with paternalistic administrators in league with
misguided parents.

In the summer-camp mentality of American universities, the
ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling
everyone's fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about their busi-
ness behind a brick wall of "theory," which they imagine is the
dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris.
Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts,
have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they
have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty
years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic
profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of
literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new
humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim
of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive frame-
work of the conservative, static and over-tenured university depart-
ments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world.
The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where
greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of
the game as on Wall Street.

Quieter, more traditional academics were outmaneuvered by
the conference crowd, and scholarship was the victim. The human-
ities centers are now controlled by small, amoral cadres that are
intricately intertwined with each other nationally by cronyism, fa-
voritism, patronage and collusion. It is essential for American in-
tellectual life that they be brought under scrutiny. And, indeed, that
is beginning to happen: in April, a prominent woman scholar filed
a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for tol-
erating an internal putsch by a cabal of politically correct faculty
members with close ties to the cultural studies center at Harvard
University.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

The solution to the present dilemma is for academic liberals to
speak out against the rampant corruption of their profession. The
reform of education is too often being left to the neoconservatives
these days. My own proposals for reform include the abolition of all
literary conferences and the replacement of women's studies with
sex studies, based on the rigorous study of world history, anthro-
pology, psychology, and science. Today, in politically correct Amer-
ica, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are
out of style.

GAY STALINISM

HAS THE GAY PRESS BEEN UNFAIR
TO CAMILLE PAGLIA?

Not all the gay press has been hostile. My X-rated book received
warm attention in gay publications from San Francisco to London.
But the scourge of political correctness is clearest in my own city:
neither of the Philadelphia gay newspapers has mentioned my name
in the two years since Sexual Personae was published.

Strident, repressive gay activists persistently distort my views.
For example, an article in The Advocate ["The Newsroom Becomes
a Battleground," Issue 603] claimed that I had called lesbians "path-
ological" — a flat-out lie. I am compared to Nazis and denounced
as a "neoconservative" — a ridiculous label for someone who publicly
defends pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, transvestism,
and sadomasochism. I am constantly called "homophobic," despite
the fact that I spent most of my adult life as an open lesbian and
paid my dues for it. My militancy and general obnoxiousness pre-
ceded both the present women's movement and Stonewall. I will
match my credentials as an Amazon and feminist pioneer against
those of my boring, lockstep critics any day.

I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church
and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate it in gay activism

[The Advocate, September 22, 1992]

1 03

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

and established feminism today. We must no longer tolerate narrow,
rigid thinking, pious cliches, and humorless party-line rhetoric.
What attracted me to gay men in college in the 1960s was their
fierce independence of mind, their whiplash tongues, and their scorn
for bourgeois decorum, saccharine sentimentality, and empty ide-
ology. They came from ordinary middle-class homes in the suburbs
or the Midwest, yet they had taste, distinction, and style — a sense
of beauty that I believe is innate and surely connected with the
artistic gene.

Gay men saw movies, television, art, opera, and fashion in a
new way — learned, enthusiastic, and brilliantly imaginative. And
they integrated sex with culture: they were bawdy, lewd, and ad-
venturous — at home on the dangerous midnight streets.

This bold, cultivated cosmopolitan sensibility is still alive in
many gay men, but you would never know it from the gay press,
whose political commentary too often smacks of wheel-spinning Sta-
linist hackwork. How did it get this bad? One can't keep blaming
AIDS, since feminism had already sunk chin-deep into mindless
propaganda before the epidemic started. I think the Stonewall re-
bellion, a central event in cultural history, had one unfortunate effect:
Gay liberation also led to sexual segregation, which has been dis-
astrous for both men and women.

In the pre-Stonewall period, the few discreet, shabby gay bars
outside major cities usually mixed the sexes. After Stonewall, the
men's bars exploded in number and luxury. I vividly remember
when the doors of the men's bars closed in my face. It was 1974,
the dawn of the orgy-room and bathhouse era. Strange parasitic
diseases soon began appearing, and by 1981 a "gay cancer" was
identified as AIDS. The price of the Sixties sexual revolution, which
I supported, was paid by gay men. We must honestly admit that
gay men's attempt to create a world without women failed catas-
trophically. Pre-Stonewall gays revered goddesslike female stars,
while the post-Stonewall scene went macho clone. The female prin-
ciple was lost.

Lesbian feminism of the last twenty years also suffered, with its
mushy do-gooder anti-art egalitarianism and its adolescent antimale
petulance. I tend to get along with pre-Stonewall lesbians, who are

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1 OS

refreshingly free of political sloganeering. It is no coincidence that
the only intelligent feminist review of Sexual Personae was by Lillian
Faderman or that when I recently met comedian Robin Tyler in
London, we instantly seemed to speak the same language of brass-
balls individualism. There is an insurgent protest movement of les-
bians fed up with the dreariness and sex phobia of the old guard,
but it's still marginal. Susie Bright and Pat Califia, with all their
many virtues, have not produced work of intellectual weight equal
to that of the puritanical Catharine MacKinnon.

My first proposal for the gay world: Get rid of dead abstract
"theory" and rabid social constructionism, the limp legacy of aca-
demic know-nothings. The Sixties were about nature, in the Ro-
mantic way. You cannot understand sex or AIDS until you
reacquaint yourself with nature and its dark mysteries. Our guide
should be not the frigid, head-tripping nerd Michel Foucault but
prophetic Allen Ginsberg, who fused Hinduism with Walt Whit-
man to give us a radical vision of energy, passion, and sensual-
ity — of homosexual desire grounded in the amoral rhythms of
nature.

Next, get rid of victimology and oppression politics. The real
revolution will come when we are free of the false dichotomy of gay/
straight and when bisexual responsiveness is accepted as the uni-
versal norm. Finally, reposition AIDS in the philosophical context
of world history. Fanatical ranting rage, the favorite face of ACT
UP, is infantile. Martin Luther King learned from Gandhi how to
make the sufferings of your people the sufferings of all humanity.
You do not invade or insult churches; you do not silence dissent or
smear as "bigots" people who oppose your practices on religious
grounds. Gay activism has got to get off its knee-jerk oppositional
mode and into an affirmative articulation of first principles, which
in my view have to be based on pagan pansexuality, a complex,
reasoned alternative to Judeo-Christian ethics.

[Afterword: Just before this article went to the printer, the headline
was sabotaged in the Advocate offices to read: "Camille Paglia Defends
Her Rotten Record." The editors launched an investigation and
apologized. In an indignant letter to the editor (Oct. 6), Paglia

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

stated: ''Incidents like this prove my point: smug, juvenile political
correctness is strangling free speech in too much of the gay and
feminist world. I invite others to join my campaign against the
Stalinists among us." The reference to Robin Tyler also caused
controversy: see the index.]

THE RETURN OF CARRY NATION!
CATHARINE MACKINNON AND
ANDREA DWORKIN

I am a pornographer. From earliest childhood, I saw sex suf-
fusing the world. I felt the rhythms of nature and the aggressive
energies of animal life. Art objects, in both museum and church,
seemed to blaze with sensual beauty. The authority figures of church,
school, and family denied or suppressed what I saw, but like Ma-
donna, I kept to my pagan vision. I belong to the Sixties generation
that tried and failed to shatter all sexual norms and taboos. In my
book, Sexual Personae, I injected lewdness, voyeurism, homoeroticism
and sadomasochism into the entire Western high-art tradition.

Because I am a pornographer, I am at war with Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. These obsessed, moralistic
women, feminism's oddest odd couple, are Carry Nation reborn.
They were co-authors of the Minneapolis and Indianapolis ordi-
nances against pornography that were declared unconstitutional.
They have produced, individually and in collaboration, an enormous
amount of material ranging from tortured autobiographical confes-
sions to legal case histories and academic Marxist critiques.

MacKinnon was among the first to argue for the establishment

[Playboy, October 1992]

1 07

1 08

VAMPS & TRAMPS

of sexual harassment as a legal category. But her positive contri-
butions to women's issues must be weighed against the responsibility
she bears for fomenting the crazed sexual hysteria that now grips
American feminism. Date rape has swelled into a catastrophic cosmic
event, like an asteroid threatening the earth in a Fifties science-
fiction film. Anita Hill, a competent but priggish, self-interested
yuppie, has been canonized as a virgin martyr ruined by the de-
praved emperor — who never laid a hand on her.

MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state-
controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every
human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between
the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a
lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker,
cultural historian, or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For
a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shock-
ingly small. She has the dull instincts and tastes of a bureaucrat.
It's all work and no play in MacKinnon Land. Literature, art, music,
film, television — nothing intrudes on MacKinnon's consciousness
unless it has been filtered through feminism, which has taught her,
she likes to say, "everything I know." There's the rub. She is some-
one who, because of her own private emotional turmoil, locked on
to Seventies-era feminism and never let go.

MacKinnon has a cold, inflexible, and fundamentally unschol-
arly mind. She is a propagandist and casuist, good at constructing
ad hoc arguments from expedience for specific political aims. But
her knowledge of intellectual or world history is limited, and as a
researcher she has remarkably poor judgment in evaluating sources.
She wildly overpraises weak feminist writers and has no feeling
whatever for psychology, a defect that makes her conclusions about
sex ridiculous. She is a Stalinist who believes that art must serve a
political agenda and that all opposing voices are enemies of humanity
who must be silenced. MacKinnon and Dworkin are fanatics, zeal-
ots, fundamentalists of the new feminist religion. Their alliance with
the reactionary, antiporn far right is no coincidence.

MacKinnon is a classic WASP who painstakingly builds huge,
rigid structures of words in complete obliviousness to the organic,
sensual, and visual. She is a twentieth-century puritan whose up-

THE CULTURE WARS

1 09

bringing — a stern Minnesota judge as father, Episcopalian and
conservative Republican — seems straight out of Hawthorne.
MacKinnon's pinched, cramped, body-denying Protestant culture
made her peculiarly susceptible to Andrea Dworkin, whose let-it-
all-hang-out ethnicity was initially liberating. MacKinnon's stolid
lack of psychology drew her to Dworkin's boiling emotionalism and
self-analytic, self-lacerating Jewishness. In return, MacKinnon, the
third-generation Smith College WASP insider, satisfied Dworkin's
longings for establishment acceptance, a nagging theme in her writ-
ing.

Dworkin, like Kate Millett, has turned a garish history of mental
instability into feminist grand opera. Dworkin publicly boasts of her
bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky
traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy's
fault rather than her own. She pretends to be a daring truth-teller
but never mentions her most obvious problem: food. Hence she is
a hypocrite. Dworkin's shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy,
squalling infantilism. This attracted MacKinnon, with her dour
background of Protestant high seriousness, which treats children like
miniature adults. MacKinnon's impersonal prose is dry, bleached,
parched. Her hereditary north-country, anal-retentive style, stingy
and nitpicking, was counterbalanced by Dworkin's raging undiffer-
entiated orality, her buckets of chicken soup spiked with spite.

Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a "type" that I recognize after
twenty-two years of teaching. I call her The Girl with the Eternal
Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp
who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt,
getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair.
In college, this type — pasty, bilious, and frumpy — is constantly sick
from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never
prepared with tissue and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toilet
paper on her lap. She is the ultimate teacher's pest, the morose,
unlovable child who never got her mama's approval and therefore
demands attention at any price. Dworkin seized on feminism as a
mask to conceal her bitterness at this tedious, banal family drama.

MacKinnon and Dworkin have become a pop duo, like Mutt
and Jeff, Steve and Eydie, Ron and Nancy. MacKinnon, starved

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

and weather-beaten, is a fierce gargoyle of American Gothic. With
her witchy tumbleweed hair, she resembles the batty, gritty pioneer
woman played by Agnes Moorehead on The Twilight Zone. Or she's
Nurse Diesel, the preachy secret sadist in Mel Brooks's High Anxiety.

Dworkin is Pee-wee Herman's Large Marge, the demon trucker
who keeps returning to the scene of her fatal accident. I see
MacKinnon and Dworkin making a female buddy picture like Thelma
& Louise. Their characters: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish, the
puritan Gibson Girl and her fuming dybbuk, the glutton for pun-
ishment. Or they'd be perfect for the starring roles in a TV docu-
drama about prissy, repressed J. Edgar Hoover and his longtime
companion, Clyde Tolson, bugging hotel rooms and sticking their
noses into everyone's business.

MacKinnon and Dworkin detest pornography because it sym-
bolizes everything they don't understand and can't control about
their own bodies. Current feminism, with its antiscience and social
constructionist bias, never thinks about nature. Hence it cannot deal
with sex, which begins in the body and is energized by instinctual
drives. MacKinnon and Dworkin's basic error is in identifying por-
nography with society, which they then simplistically define as pa-
triarchal and oppressive. In fact, pornography, which erupts into
the open in periods of personal freedom, shows the dark truth about
nature, concealed by the artifices of civilization. Pornography is
about lust, our animal reality that will never be fully tamed by love.
Lust is elemental, aggressive, asocial. Pornography allows us to ex-
plore our deepest, most forbidden selves.

The MacKinnon-Dworkin party line on pornography is pre-
posterous. "Pornography is sex discrimination," they declared in
their Minneapolis ordinance. In a manifesto, they call pornography
"hate literature." "Most women hate pornography; all pornography
hates women." MacKinnon and Dworkin display an astounding
ignorance of the ancient, sacred pornographic tradition of non-
Western societies, as well as that of our own gay male culture.
Dworkin's blanket condemnation of fellatio as disgusting and violent
should make every man furious.

MacKinnon and Dworkin are victim-mongers, ambulance chas-
ers, atrocity addicts. MacKinnon begins every argument from big,

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111

flawed premises such as "male supremacy" or "misogyny," while
Dworkin spouts glib Auschwitz metaphors at the drop of a bra.
Here's one of their typical maxims: "The pornographers rank with
Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence." Anyone
who could write such a sentence knows nothing about pornography
or Nazism. Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which
predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur
not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite,
a breakdown of social controls. MacKinnon and Dworkin, like most
feminists today, lack a general knowledge of criminology or psycho-
pathology and hence have no perspective on or insight into the
bloody, lurid human record, with its disasters and triumphs.

In this mechanized technological world of steel and glass, the
fires of sex have to be stoked. This is why pornography must continue
to play a central role in our cultural life. Pornography is a pagan
arena of beauty, vitality, and brutality, of the archaic vigor of nature.
It should break every rule, offend all morality. Pornography rep-
resents absolute freedom of imagination, as envisioned by the Ro-
mantic poets. In arguing that a hypothetical physical safety on the
streets should take precedence over the democratic principle of free
speech, MacKinnon aligns herself with the authoritarian Soviet com-
missars. She would lobotomize the village in order to save it.

An enlightened feminism of the twenty-first century will embrace
all sexuality and will turn away from the delusionalism, sanctimony,
prudery, and male-bashing of the MacKinnon-Dworkin brigade.
Women will never know who they are until they let men be men.
Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of belly achers,
anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors.
Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches
of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

Pornography lets the body live in pagan glory, the lush, dis-
orderly fullness of the flesh. When it defines man as the enemy,
feminism is alienating women from their own bodies. MacKinnon
never deals with woman as mother, lover, or whore. Snuff films are
her puritan hallucinations of hellfire. She traffics in tales of terror,
hysterical fantasies of death and dismemberment, which shows that
she does not understand the great god Dionysus, with his terrible

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

duality. The demons are within us. MacKinnon and Dworkin, ped-
dling their diseased rhetoric, are in denial, and what they are block-
ing is life itself, in all its grandeur and messiness. Let's send a message
to the Mad Hatter and her dumpy dormouse to stop trying to run
other people's tea parties.

THE NEW SEXISM:
LIBERATING ART AND BEAUTY

Washington had a sizzling hit show with "Walk the Goddess
Walk: Power Inside Out," recently on view at the District of Co-
lumbia Arts Center and curated by artist Alison Maddex. The Sep-
tember 10 opening, featuring performance and video artists such as
Manhattan drag queen Glennda Orgasm, drew a crowd of over a
thousand.

Above all, "Walk the Goddess Walk" demonstrated that, in
the current unadventurous Washington art scene, there is a great
craving for excitement and the challenge of something new. I sus-
pect that we were also seeing a rejection of the political correct-
ness that is stunting the cultural development of a whole generation
of young women emerging from elite American colleges and uni-
versities.

Like Maddex, with whom I collaborated in the show, I have
despaired about the tendentiousness, ignorance, and mediocrity of
feminist attitudes toward art and beauty. Issues of quality and stan-
dards have been foolishly abandoned by liberals, who now interpret
aesthetics as nothing but a mask for ideology. As a result, the far

[The Washington Post, September 26, 1993]

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VAMPS & TR A M PS

right has gained enormously. What madness is abroad in the land
when only neoconservatives will defend the grandeur of art?

Ironically, today's fashion magazines and supermodels, em-
bodying the cult of beauty for a mass audience, are in the main line
of art history. Cultural authenticity has shifted to them and away
from the establishment ideologues like those running the Whitney
Museum in New York, who are obsessed with a passe political
agenda.

When Maddex and I toured the Whitney's rape exhibit this
summer, we were appalled and incredulous. Visitors were wandering
around with tears in their eyes, as rape victims recited their sorrows
on a video monitor. When the offerings of a major museum are
indistinguishable from the victimization soap opera of television talk
shows, art has ceased to exist. The intelligent, courageous artist and
curator would defy the rape hysteria, not surrender to it.

Danger signs are everywhere that we are sliding into a new era
of the Red Guards. As I know from my visits to campuses across
the country, abuse and intimidation await anyone who dares to reject
the party line on sexual and political issues. There is a trend among
followers of the ideas of Catharine MacKinnon which has resulted
in vandalism of art works that fail to conform to feminist orthodoxy.
The pro-sex wing of feminism sat around smugly for years, content
that it had signed a list or two defending pornography and never
realizing that its total silence on the date rape and sexual harrass-
ment issues facilitated MacKinnon's rise.

One of the many lies of women's studies is that European art
history was written by white males and that feminism has conclu-
sively rewritten that history by discovering and restoring major fe-
male artists excluded from the pantheon by patriarchal conspiracy.
But European art history was not just written but created by white
males. We may lament the limitations placed on women's training
and professional access in the past, but what is done cannot be
undone.

The last twenty years of scholarship have brought many for-
gotten women artists to attention, but too often their presentation
has been marred by anachronistic feminist rhetoric. Nancy G.
Heller's lucid, evenhanded Women Artists is a noteworthy exception

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115

to this depressing trend. Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race regrett-
ably veers again and again into agitprop, worst of all on the last
page, where Greer declares that the reason there have been no great
female artists is that you cannot get great art from "mutilated egos."
I would argue that great art comes only from mutilated egos.

Feminism, for all its boasts, has not found a single major female
painter or sculptor to add to the canon. It did revive the reputations
of many minor women, like Frida Kahlo or Romaine Brooks. Mary
Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler were known
and did not need rediscovery. Artemisia Gentileschi was simply a
polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men.

Women's studies has not shifted the massive structure of art
history one jot. It is scandalous that our most talented women un-
dergraduates are being tutored in attitudes of juvenile resentment
toward major male artists of the rank of Degas, Picasso, and Marcel
Duchamp, who have become virtual untouchables. We will never
get great art from women if their education exposes them only to
the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness
is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has
defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excel-
lence.

Now is the time for all pro-sex, pro-art, pro-beauty feminists to
come out of the closet. Maddex and I have created what we call
Neo-Sexism, or the New Sexism. It is a progressive feminism that
embraces and celebrates all historical depictions of women, including
the most luridly pornographic. It wants mythology without senti-
mentality and every archetype, from mother to witch and whore,
without censorship. It accepts and welcomes the testimony of men.

The New Sexism puts sensuality at the center of our respon-
siveness to life and art. Rejecting the bourgeois feminist obsession
with anorexia and bulimia, it sets food and sex into the same con-
tinuum of the pleasure principle. It calls for a new, vivid language
of art criticism that reveres the art work instead of talking down to
it. No more dead jargon and empty theory; no more ideology sub-
stituting for appreciation; no more moralism masquerading as pol-
itics.

All art belongs to its social context, but great art by definition

lie

VAMPS & TRAMPS

transcends that context and speaks universally. Sex is one of the
supreme subjects of art and literature of the last two hundred years.
It deserves to be treated in a way that respects its mystery and
complexity. That is what "Walk the Goddess Walk" tried to do. It
was designed to overthrow the tyranny of false politics and to open
the mind toward art — the spiritual and carnal record of mankind.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE
STUDENTS OF HARVARD

Anyone concerned with the future of literature and art in Amer-
ica should be repelled by that witches' brew of hypocrisy and
sanctimony called "political correctness," which has poisoned the
professional life of the elite colleges and universities. If there is to
be a spiritual and intellectual revival, it is today's students who must
do it. The academic establishment, paralyzed by cronyism, greed,
and moral cowardice, is incapable of reforming itself.

For twenty-five years, I have watched from a distance as Har-
vard's distinguished tradition of literary scholarship has self-
destructed. In 1968, when I left college (I attended the State Uni-
versity of New York at Binghamton), the graduate English programs
of Harvard and Yale were nationally rated as equivalent in stature.
Accepted at both, I chose Yale rather than Harvard, since Harvard
required graduate students to teach — a questionable practice that
allowed senior faculty to minimize direct contact with undergrad-
uates.

My Sixties generation, with its irreverence and confrontational
style, was determined to make profound changes in America's po-
litical and cultural life. Education in the humanities had become

[Harvard Crimson, February 17, 1994]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

narrow and desiccated, imprisoned by an overspecialized, over-
departmentalized curricular structure. Those of us who were most
influenced by popular culture, psychedelia, and the sexual revolution
felt that the universities had lost touch with reality. We wanted to
end authoritarian overcontrol of our private lives. And we were
militant about free speech, which had launched the first student
demonstrations at Berkeley.

What is most disgusting about current political correctness on
campus is that its proponents have managed to convince their stu-
dents and the media that they are authentic Sixties radicals. The
idea is preposterous. Political correctness, with its fascist speech
codes and puritanical sexual regulations, is a travesty of Sixties
progressive values. And except for the sociologist Todd Gitlin, not
a single Sixties political activist holds a tenured professorship at any
of the elite schools, coast to coast.

On the contrary, the boldest and most original Sixties people
either did not go on to graduate school or refused to play the sy-
cophantic career game required for advance in academe. The ten-
ured Ivy League literature faculty who are in their forties are
chronologically my generation, but they made their way up the
ladder not because they were of the Sixties but because there was
nothing Sixties about them. I know, because I was in graduate school
with these characters. They never challenged or threatened the status
quo — which is exactly why they were handpicked to succeed the
conservative old guard.

In literary studies, text-centered New Criticism had reached a
dead end and needed to be widened and deepened, through the
study of history and sexuality, respectively. Important North Amer-
ican writers who helped Sixties students to rechart the mental land-
scape in an interdisciplinary way were Allen Ginsberg, Norman O.
Brown, Marshall McLuhan, and Leslie Fiedler. But my fellow grad-
uate students, far from absorbing these radical thinkers, were soon
off chasing dull, pedantic European poststructuralists, who were
trapped in cynical, verbose mind games that my generation had
gotten rid of when we substituted Elvis Presley for Samuel Beckett
(Foucault's idol). Despite their inflated reputations, none of the
French theorists, including Foucault, is competent at speculation

THE CULTURE WARS

119

about either history or sexuality. Those who claim otherwise simply
don't know what they're talking about.

Let me give just one example of how the Ivy League awards its
highest honors. A leading Harvard woman professor rose to prom-
inence by her discipleship of Paul de Man and Derrida. Then it was
revealed that de Man was a Nazi sympathizer. As deconstruction
sank, she switched into feminism and African-American studies,
neither of which her books had shown prior interest in. This was
capped off by her dramatic avowal, at an October 1991 Harvard
Yard rally, of her lesbianism, which is now chic.

Excuse me for my contempt. As the only openly gay person at
the Yale graduate school (1968-72), I paid the career price for my
pre-Stonewall candor. Where were all these lesbians when it mat-
tered? They stayed in the closet until tenure — and other people's
sacrifices — made it safe to come out and claim the spoils. The then-
bizarre themes of my dissertation — homosexuality, transvestism,
transsexualism, sadomasochism — also ensured that no research uni-
versity would hire me. I am just one of incalculable numbers of
people of my generation whose fidelity to Sixties principles led to
their exclusion from the establishment. That is tolerable, since we
disdain money and status. What is intolerable is that frauds and
poseurs, who rejected American culture to make shiny new gods out
of French theorists, should now claim to be the heirs of Sixties
thought.

The bottom fell out of the Harvard literature departments in
the Seventies. They had failed to find new blood to continue Har-
vard's reputation into the next generation, while Yale, after a bitter
battle with undertones of anti-Semitism, secured Harold Bloom and
Geoffrey Hartman, followed by established names from Johns Hop-
kins. Harvard waited too long to respond to contemporary changes;
no younger faculty came remotely near the great scholarly level of
Harry Levin and Walter Jackson Bate. The English department
nearly went into receivership. Ten years after I entered grad school,
Harvard's reputation in literature hit rock bottom.

Desperate, the Harvard administration went on a fast shopping
expedition and filled the faculty with the current hot property, the-
orists, many of them women, as an affirmative action sop. Now

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

you're stuck with them. Theory is moribund everywhere, but Har-
vard, which sacrificed scholarly standards for expedience, has con-
demned itself to at least two generations of mediocrity in the
humanities, since these people are certain to hire only those who
will prop up their decaying reputations. Harvard students are sadly
mistaken if they think the literature faculty in their thirties and forties
are the best America has to offer. It was the cliquish conference
circuit, a crassly commercial phenomenon only twenty years old,
that put those opportunistic trend-chasers in your classrooms. Under
its hip varnish, their work is shoddy and shallow.

When will Ivy League students wake up to the corruption that
is all around them? The leftist press in America has been grossly
negligent in not identifying and attacking the slick career system
that has made deception, pretension, and manipulation business-as-
usual in the humanities since the Seventies. Economic analysis
should be the first principle of authentic leftism. Phony, obfuscatory,
elitist French theory became the ticket to ride for an amoral coterie
that is intricately interconnected from Berkeley to Duke to Princeton
and Harvard. These days, they pretend to be doing "cultural
studies," an amateurish mishmash of this and that, without scholarly
command of any area. Student newspapers, which used to question
authority and attack the establishment, have been lazily oblivious
to a national scandal equal to that of the Wall Street junk-bond
crash.

The solution is in your hands. You can bring learning back to
the center of the university. You can end the era of gimmicky theory.
You can demand that quality of scholarship, rather than slick word-
play, be the standard for employment at Harvard. How? First make
the library your teacher. Rediscover the now neglected works of the
great scholars of the last 150 years, who worked blessedly free of the
mental pollutants of poststructuralism. Immerse yourself in the ref-
erence collection, and master chronology and etymology. Refuse to
cooperate with the coercive ersatz humanitarianism that insultingly
defines women and African-Americans as victims. Insist on free
thought and free speech. OfTensiveness is a democratic right. The
university should be organized around vigorous intellectual inquiry,
not therapy or creature comforts. Harvard has become a nursing
home for kids.

THE CULTURE WARS

121

I have elsewhere detailed my proposals for massive reform of
the university: an end to departmentalization of literature by na-
tionalities; sex studies, rather than the overideological and unscien-
i tific women's studies and gay studies; and a world plan for a truly
j scholarly and depoliticized multiculturalism, based on comparative
religion, archaeology, art history, and anthropology. The liberal
versus conservative argument is pointless and passe. Its rhetoric has
simply concealed the venality and sycophancy of the academic mar-
ketplace, which has in actuality driven the conflicts of the past fifteen
years. In the twenty-first century, we will want something new.
Today's students can create it.

ON CENSORSHIP

OBSERVER. Are you for or against censorship?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. I am opposed to censorship because of my over-
arching theory that what we define — what tradition defines —
as morally reprehensible and worthy of suppression is, in fact,
the pagan element in Western culture that was never defeated.
The elements of sex and violence that most disturb people, all
the untidy and amoral forces of nature the pagan tradition was
more honest about, are what the Judeo-Christian tradition has
always struggled with.

OBSERVER. Is there any case for censorship?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. There should be no censorship of any kind. On
the other hand, I think one can raise questions of appropriate-
ness. If you're teaching children, I think it is reasonable to
believe that teachers should not impose their sophisticated sex-
ual visions on them. I wouldn't call it censorship if a school
said, "That's inappropriate for young children."

[The Observer, London, April 10, 1994]

1 22

THE CULTURE WARS

1 23

OBSERVER. What is your position on the censorship of pornography?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. My point in Sexual Personae is that one cannot
make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography.
In fact, porn permeates the high art tradition. Even Michel-
angelo's Pieta, the supreme artifact of the Vatican, is a work of
pornography — when you look at it up close.

OBSERVER. Does that mean all pornography should be freely avail-
able to adults?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. I am on record as saying that one can reasonably
restrict public displays of pornography. The public spaces, the
free spaces, and so on belong to both traditions — the Judeo-
Christian and the pagan — and, therefore, a person should not
have to have naked ladies overwhelming the eye from a news-
stand. On the other hand, those magazines should be available
at the newsstand.

I hate the way feminists in America have managed to pressure
the drugstore chains so that you can no longer buy Playboy or
Penthouse. The major men's magazines are all but censored, be-
cause no one is able to find them outside the urban centers. This
has occurred without a ripple over here.

OBSERVER. Why?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. There has been this incredible alliance between
the feminists, the Catholic schools, and the far right. As a result,
something very bad has happened.

In the Sixties, part of what my generation did was the sexual
revolution. Women of my period were bawdy in our speech. We
were trying to break down the old middle-class conventions, and
part of this was the fabulous sex magazines of the time — men
and women looked at them. They were artistic, they were funky,
they were radical in their politics.

Also, you had middle-class women going with their boy-
friends and husbands to porn theaters to see Deep Throat. That
was a breakthrough. We'd never even heard about oral sex,
much less seen it demonstrated.

But now, in the puritanical revisionism of things, it's like Deep

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Throat is the ultimate symbol of a woman being raped — being
forced to perform oral sex. It's loathsome. There has been a
horrible retreat into puritanism since the Sixties.

OBSERVER. Is that a failing of imagination?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. My explanation is usually that the most interest-
ing and innovative and bawdy members of my generation did
not go on into the standard professions. They took drugs. They
sort of cancelled themselves out.

OBSERVER. What is your position on child pornography?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. I maintain that Donatello's David, one of the most
important, revolutionary works in the whole history of art, is,
in fact, a work of child pornography.

Then there's the Valentine thing, the Valentine's Day Cupid
with its plush infant body. That's an eroticization of the child's
body that we're used to seeing. It goes back to ancient Rome,
where you find babies presented as sensuous.

Germaine Greer says in her book Sex and Destiny that non-
Western cultures are very open about the kind of physicality
they permit between adults and children. Pleasures are taken
with children's bodies that would be defined, in our culture, as
abuse or rape.

OBSERVER. So it's a cultural issue, not a legal one?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. I believe that the abolition of child labor was one
of the great reform movements of the last 200 years. If you have
children posing for pornographic pictures and videos, that is an
infringement — not of something sexual — but of what we now
feel is civilized, that children should not be forced to labor.

OBSERVER. Isn't that a dangerous opinion?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. As far as any visual, imaginary representations
that are sketched or painted of children in pornographic acts —
again, I'm considered pretty radical here, on the lunatic fringe
with this one — I feel: so what? Anything that can be imagined
should be depicted.

THE CULTURE WARS

1 25

OBSERVER. Are you sure?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. I feel that that's the only way we can keep our-
selves from sliding into dogmatism. To most people, these kinds
of things are abhorrent. They can't look at them without being
disturbed. So I feel that intellectuals and artists are obliged to
force themselves to depict them, to write about them.

That's why I'm a great fan of the Marquis de Sade. He was
trying, in prison, to reach the limits of the human sexual imag-
ination, and to put it down on paper.

OBSERVER. You yourself were recently the subject of censorship over
a film in which you confronted anti-porn campaigners on the
streets of New York. Can you explain this?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. For years, these women have harassed people on
the sidewalks in Greenwich Village. They hold out these pictures
of women bound with ropes, from Hustler or wherever, and force
them in people's faces and scream and yell.

My sister, who lives there, says it's just appalling, because
these women are forcing these images on people in the street
when there are small children around.

They're insane, literally insane. They're total fanatics, and
anyone who has seen them in New York understands what I
was doing — I mean, to go up to them and yell at them, to force
the cameras on them, and — suddenly — they're just cowards.

So this film, which has been shown at Sundance, the most
prestigious film festival in the country, has been censored. It
was suppressed by the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
A film made on the streets of New York!

OBSERVER. What about self-censorship?

CAMILLE PAGLIA. This is my rebuke to the white middle-class, re-
spectable feminist movement. When I was last over in England
I threw one of your prominent feminists right out of an interview.
They are so pompous, so respectable — so self-censored. This is
why they do all this complaining: "Why is it that the American
feminists get all the attention? Why don't we get any attention?"
Why? Because you're boring middle-class ladies.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

OBSERVER. Don't feminists censor like everyone else?

CAM IEEE PAGLIA. There is absolutely totalitarian censorship of any
divergent or dissenting opinions within the world of women's
studies. I couldn't get a job anywhere in the Seventies. When
I came on the scene, if you ever breathed one word against
women's studies — just opened your mouth — you were tarred as
a male-chauvinist pig, as a reactionary, as a neo-conscrvative.

( OBSERVER. Really?

CAM IEEE PAGLIA. I love the situation in England, where you have
the Page Three girls. I adore that. The idea that you open up
a family newspaper and see all those bare boobs. That's abso-
lutely fabulous, it's unheard of in America — it would be abso-
lutely impossible.

POP THEATER

WOODY ALLEN AGONISTES

Two weeks ago, the discreet twelve-year relationship between
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow exploded into public attention in a
media firestorm of charges and countercharges. Day after day,
screaming headlines documented the revelations: Allen had filed for
custody of the couple's three small children; he had been accused
of molestation of one of them in Connecticut; he admitted a sexual
liaison with Farrow's adopted Korean daughter, Soon-Yi Previn,
whose age has been variously reported as nineteen or twenty-one.

After an initial period of confusion, most sensible people seemed
willing to suspend judgment for the moment on the child abuse
charge, in the absence of hard evidence. But on talk shows and in
the print media, there was a thunderous chorus of condemnation of
Allen for his relationship with Soon-Yi. Family therapists, feminists,
and church-going conservatives called it callous, lecherous, inces-
tuous, decadent. Woody Allen, one of feminism's great white hopes
for the ideal "sensitive male," had flunked out. The lovable nerd
was just another leering Nero.

This controversy is a perfect thermometer for taking the tem-
perature of the American psyche. Twenty-five years after the sexual

[New York Newsday, December 2, 1992]

1 29

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VAMPS 6t TRAMPS

revolution, what have we learned about ourselves? Practically noth-
ing. Contrary to feminist propaganda, we have not found the answer
to any important sexual issue. In fact, as the century ends, we have
barely begun to pose the questions correctly.

At his press conference two weeks ago, Woody Allen said there
is "no logic" to falling in love. This ancient wisdom about the Dio-
nysian irrationality of our emotional lives is documented in the ear-
liest Greek and Roman love poetry. It is a great spiritual truth sadly
missing from the ugly, clumsy ideology of current feminism, which
is obsessed with social-welfare cliches of oppression, victimization
and "care-giving."

Woody Allen is an artist. To whom does he owe ultimate re-
sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to
celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break
taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.
Though his films have weakened recently, Allen is one of the central
analysts of contemporary American manners and sexual experience.
It is outrageous that therapists, bystanders, and pundits of every
stripe have used this painful crisis to strike hysterical poses of moral
superiority over him.

Picasso, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Madonna, Robert Map-
plethorpe: during the past decade, each of these important artists
has been denounced by holier-than-thou groups, from feminists to
the Moral Majority, for their unsettling themes or bohemian life-
styles. This provincial American abuse of artists must end. Neither
art nor the artist will ever conform to bourgeois decorum or tidy
moral codes. Originality is by definition rule-breaking.

Allen's films, like Bananas, Love and Death, and Annie Hall, often
show the comic inadequacy of words, reason, or good intentions to
deal with the storminess of sex and love. In Broadway Danny Rose,
he himself plays a gentle, earnest, compassionate bumbler over-
whelmed by a flamboyant, vengeful Italian firecracker, wonderfully
portrayed by Mia Farrow.

Farrow seems to have carried this unexpected flair for Italian
theatricality into her present life drama, in which she has managed
to exert maximum power while deftly avoiding overt public state-
ments. Dispatching a host of adult and pint-sized proxies as skillfully
as Shakespeare's volatile Cleopatra, Farrow has fused Puccini her-

POP THEATER

131

oines: she is both the pining, abandoned mother, Madame Butterfly,
and the tempestuous, jealous diva, Tosca, who uses any weapon
that comes to hand.

There has been an undertone of perversity or kinkiness in Far-
row's sexual personae from the start of her career. Her May/
December marriage to Frank Sinatra still astonishes. Who can forget
that first yacht-deck photo of the hard-bitten casino roue next to the
androgynous gossamer waif? (Sinatra's ex, Ava Gardner, snapped,
"I always knew Frank would end up with a boy.") In Secret Ceremony
Farrow played a delusional girl-woman projecting a homoerotic in-
cest fantasy onto a very patient Elizabeth Taylor. In Rosemary's Baby
she fought for her pregnancy against the forces of darkness and oddly
nosy neighbors on Central Park West.

Motherhood is a far more complex phenomenon than the current
brand of neat-as-pie yuppie feminism admits. Motherhood may un-
leash primal instincts for possession and territoriality beyond mo-
rality. Hovering vulturelike over the whole affair is Farrow's dowager
queen mother, actress Maureen O'Sullivan, hurling Junoesque thun-
derbolts at Allen (in her words, an "evil" man) from her stronghold
on the West Coast. Farrow's sprawling, multiracial household is in
its own way tribal and matriarchal.

Allen is being impugned as an "immature" satyr with a Lolita
fixation, like those other small-statured collectors of nymphets, Char-
lie Chaplin and Roman Polanski. The pursuit of youth and beauty
has also been an integral part of highly accomplished gay male life
for centuries. Allen has the right to seek his muse wherever he may
find her. The quiet, dreamy Soon-Yi, paternalistically trashed by
the bleeding-heart commentators as "helpless," "passive," and
"naive," may represent simplicity and emotional truth to Allen. Such
insights, even if transient, are priceless to an artist.

Is it incest? Legally, no. Psychologically, yes. But incest is a
universal theme in world mythology that we have never come to
terms with. Doing the research for Sexual Personae, I was stunned at
the frequency of incest in Romantic literature. And incest permeates
the two greatest plays ever written, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and
Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Freud's theory of infantile sexuality is a century old, yet it re-
mains unabsorbed. Most parents could not function at home if they

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

fully accepted their children's sexuality. Our horrified fascination
with the Allen/Farrow scandal comes partly from our own repres-
sions. Similarly, the child-abuse witch-hunts focusing on day-care
centers in recent years are baseless hallucinations, eruptions from
our vestigial Anglo-Saxon puritanism.

Woody Allen's love life began in the shadow of the potent Jewish
mother, then evolved through brunette and blonde shiksa goddesses
to an Asian Mona Lisa. Thus it is ironic that he who moved so far
romantically from his Jewish roots should still end up accused of
incest. Like Oedipus, he could not escape his fate.

This sorry episode in the showbiz chronicles has much to teach
us. Don't send your Valentines with a Betty Crocker stamp. Cruelty
and brutality lie just beneath the surface of love. Intimacy and incest
may be psychologically intertwined. Power relations may generate
eroticism. Perhaps — bad news for sexual harassment rules — hier-
archy can never be completely desexed.

At his press conference, Woody Allen looked haggard and rum-
pled, like a graduate student flushed out of an all-night study session.
In giving anguished testimony about the mystery, compulsion, and
folly of sexual attraction, he has recovered and renewed his cultural
status: the artist as scapegoat, illuminating our lives through his
own suffering.

OUR TABLOID PRINCESS:
AMY FISHER

Amy Fisher is America's Diana, our tabloid princess. Many
people at first ignored the case of the "Long Island Lolita," the
seventeen-year-old high school senior who shot the wife of her thirty-
eight-year-old lover in the head. But those who dismissed it as too
trivial or vulgar were forced to take a second look when three different
TV movies on the scandal were broadcast in a single week earlier
this month, to smash ratings.

Since it broke last May, the Amy Fisher story competed with
the presidential campaign and threatened to upstage the inaugu-
ration itself. Faced with this mass phenomenon, the establishment
press responded only with disdainful bewilderment or pious hand-
wringing over the debasement of popular taste and journalistic stan-
dards. Enough crocodile tears were shed to float the African Queen.

Like the recent fiasco of Zoe Baird's failed nomination as at-
torney general, the Amy Fisher phenomenon dramatically demon-
strates how out of touch the cultural elite is with popular thought.
For years, mainstream feminists have shrilly hammered at us about
date rape, sexual harassment, and child abuse. They have portrayed

[San Francisco Examiner, January 31, 1993]

1 33

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VAMPS fit TRAMPS

life under ''patriarchy" as a tear-stained melodrama of lecherous
male tyrants and passive female victims.

The feminist inquisitors tirelessly pounce on whipping-boys-of-
the-month — philandering Senator Bob Packwood is their latest de-
monic centerfold — but the popular imagination keeps stubbornly
rejecting their simplistic sexual scenario and refreshing itself in tab-
loid truth. The instant myth of Amy Fisher turned feminist dogma
on its head: as in the hit films Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and The
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, woman rules and destroys. The femme
fa tale is for real.

Early commentators on the Fisher case tried to reduce it to pat
social-welfare formulas. There was the usual hunting-for-victims that
has become such a tedious substitute for analysis in America. Was
man-of-the-people Joey Buttafuoco the victim of a wily little tramp?
Or was Amy the naive victim of a slick gigolo who had his jollies
and got off scot-free, while the women suffered? And surely some-
where in Amy's childhood there had to be "abuse" — the feminist
stock response to anything ambiguous in human behavior.

When long-haired Amy, spoiled only child, mall chick and part-
time call-girl, mounted the Buttafuoco porch with a pistol in her
pocket, every power play in the history of love was on red alert. It
was high noon on a Tennessee Williams veranda. Though reviewers
ineptly hailed the meandering ABC movie, starring scrumptious
Drew Barrymore, as the best of the three, it was in fact only the first
version, NBC's tightly paced "Amy Fisher: My Story," featuring
the unheralded Noelle Parker, that got it right.

Amy vs. Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the porch was a trash tango,
a clash of the female titans. Joey, the absent ostensible subject,
shrank to nothing. He is a poof man, a stud muffin, a big calzone.
Amy and Mary Jo faced off in a street fight, a territorial war for
possession of sexual property. The NBC movie showed mutual in-
sults escalating into clumsy violence, which exploded out of the
normal and ordinary. It was terrifying.

In my opinion, the crucial element in this story is Mary Jo's
refusal to leave her husband, despite her facial paralysis and the
bullet now permanently in her head. People would long ago have
lost interest without this detail, which is more unique and perplexing

POP THEATER

1 35

than the standard mystery-tale motif of how-much-did-the-husband-
know about the murder plot in advance.

Fresh from the hospital, Mary Jo, mouth distorted, harangued
a mob of skeptical reporters on the porch, bitterly denouncing Amy
Fisher and defending the virtue of her spouse. She even sang praises
about their "better than ever" sex life on Howard Stern's radio show.
It was an astonishing display of female triumph of the will. A be-
trayed wife had won back her man and defeated her younger com-
petitor.

On the Donahue show a few weeks ago, Mary Jo sat serenely by
her husband, who proclaimed his innocence against a hostile au-
dience and the host himself, who called him 4 'the most hated man
in America. " But Joey Buttafuoco is just a puppet maneuvered by
a maternal dominatrix, who has pulled him back into the domestic
orbit as the third of her children. Her head wound is the battle scar
of a total victory.

At the end of the Donahue show, Mary Jo's Irish mother stood
up and spat defiance at the crowd. Joey "wouldn't be sitting up
there" — alive on this planet was the implication — if she thought he
had hurt her daughter. Mother and daughter had eerily the same
face, a grimly downturned mouth chiseled on a boxer's jaw. The
feminist view of male oppression is naive. Woman is dominant.

The child-abuse obsession of the past decade, which plastered
pictures of missing tots on milk cartons and now induces unknowns
and celebrities to make public confessions of miraculously restored
memories of ancient molestation, is predicated on a black-and-white
paradigm of adult defilement of childhood innocence. The Lolita
archetype is the fascinating heart of the Amy Fisher case. Lolita is
not merely a male fantasy. A man — novelist Vladimir Nabokov —
may have named her, but she is drawn from life.

Lolita melts the sexual borderline that society has artificially
drawn between child and adult. She is as conscious, willful, and
manipulative as any mature woman. In Amy Fisher we saw Lolita
in action, spinning her erotic spells from the high-school girls' room
to the auto body shop. More power to her. Sitting in jail, she is
paying the price for her daring pirate raids on respectability and
convention.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

The Amy Fisher case shows the limitations of current feminist
thinking about sex. Neither mainstream nor academic feminists are
comfortable with the kind of aggressive, sleazy eroticism flaunted
by Amy and her paramours. Genteel middle-class feminists cannot
understand the cocky, swaggering, working-class masculinity of Joey
Buttafuoco, which is far more important and universal than the
cowed less-than-manhood of the polite white-collar wordsmiths who
have swallowed the feminist line in academe and the media.

The official rhetoric of the cultural elite is completely out of
sync with the actual evidence of experience. In sentencing her to
five to fifteen years in prison for first-degree assault, the judge told
Amy that she was "motivated by lust and passion" and had pursued
Mary Jo "like a wild animal stalks its prey." The sex impulse,
uncontrolled in its natural state, is barbaric. Feminism has got to
look honestly at the animal savagery and lust in all of us and stop
blaming men for the darkness of the human condition.

THE FEMALE LENNY BRUCE!
SANDRA BERNHARD

As a guest of the British Broadcasting Company, which is doing
a documentary on her, I recently saw Sandra Bernhardt new show,
Giving Till It Hurts, at New York's Paramount Theater. From its
campy celebration of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls to its
prayer to San Francisco's late great Sylvester, the drag king of disco,
I felt that I was seeing my own spiritual autobiography unfold before
my eyes.

Bernhard's career has surged forward in the last two years after
a long period in which she never stopped working but seemed to
many people to be wasting her talent in erratic, self-indulgent dis-
plays of chic cynicism. Bernhard first gained broad public attention
for her brilliant performance as a terrifyingly seductive sociopath in
Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983), which earned her a
permanent place in film history.

Like Jessica Walter after her dazzling performance as a violent
erotomaniac in Play Misty for Me, Bernhard was shortchanged by
Hollywood, which never came up with the kind of meaty film noir
roles she deserved. Bernhard continued doing her strange brand of
performance art in comedy clubs around the country, but unfortu-

[San Francisco Examiner, December 6, 1992]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

nately the way she stayed in the national eye was through some two-
dozen unsettling television appearances on the David Letterman
show.

I happen to detest David Letterman as the essence of cheap,
snide, adolescent, white-bread humor. At first, I forced myself to
watch the show if Bernhard was on but, upset and horrified, finally
gave up. Jittery and wild-eyed, she seemed to be on an express train
to self-destruction.

In 1986, Bernhard began collaborating with writer-director John
Boskovich, leading up to the first of her two shows, Without You I'm
Nothing, which was made into a movie in 1990. During the show's
six-month run in New York in 1988, Bernhard met Madonna, and
the two cavorted around town as prankish "gal pals." Were they
lovers or not? The tabloids had a field day.

In the past year Bernhard became a regular on Roseanne, the
top-rated mainstream sitcom, but retained her on-the-edge flair by
posing nude for Playboy and hosting a bizarre HBO party special
with a garish Fellini decadence.

With her new stage show, Bernhard has emerged as a more
mature and confident star. The undertone of bitterness and disil-
lusion that ran through her early career seems gone. Her romantic
disappointments have deepened her as a performer.

As a sexual persona, Bernhard is unique in the contemporary
arts. She is completely American. No other country can produce this
kind of brashly individualistic woman, harsh, aggressive, raunchy
and physical, with an imagination drenched in thirty flamboyant
years of popular culture.

My sense of identification with Bernhard's volatile worldview
comes partly from a shared ethnic history. Suburbia, which flowered
after World War II, is still insufficiently understood. It was here
that the rich, ethnic, extended families collapsed into the tense,
isolated nuclear family, which tried to sanitize itself into conventional
American normality.

The repressions of suburbia have produced Bernhard, Ma-
donna, and me. Half of us is a nice suburban girl; the other half is
a raving pornographic maniac, the beast buried in the cellar.

Bernhard's creativity springs from these cultural conflicts. Her

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Jewish family, with its East Coast sensibility, was transplanted from
Michigan to Arizona. Like Bette Midler growing up in Hawaii,
Bernhard was an alien.

Her geographical displacement was intensified by a gender dis-
placement. In her new show, Bernhard speaks of her teen-age an-
guish over her period not beginning until she was seventeen. Too
tall and neither blond nor cute, Bernhard was not destined for prom
queen.

Bernhard's act is shot through with autobiographical musings,
the seething longings and glamourous dreams of a prisoner in the
pleasant suburban wasteland. Like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath,
she is a Confessional poet. But Bernhard has turned Confessionalism
away from suicide and toward comedy, a mode of survival and
redemption rather than loss.

American stand-up comedy began in vaudeville and was trans-
formed into social commentary by Lenny Bruce. There was a pen-
etrating style of Jewish intellectuality, typified by Mike Nichols and
Elaine May and the early Joan Rivers, that regrettably has gone out
of fashion in comedy in the past fifteen years. Joy Behar, with her
devastating Catherine Deneuve parodies, briefly revived it but
seemed to lose interest.

Sandra Bernhard has Lenny Bruce's brooding menace and quick,
razor-sharp mind. She re-creates the brainy neuroticism and earthy
sensuality of Beatnik women, with their gloomy hipster realism. By
her gutsy insistence on singing — in an ever-improving but often thin
or fractured voice — Bernhard has rejoined stand-up to its origins in
vaudeville, where music and comedy were brassily interwoven.

All musical styles of the past quarter century are evoked in
Bernhard's shows: jazz, Broadway, country, rock, soul, Motown,
disco, as ingeniously reinterpreted by a Jewish rapper. It's a vast
aural spectacle. For my Sixties generation, cultural history is popular
music, in a way incomprehensible in Europe.

Fragments of ads, brand names, movies, TV, and celebrity gos-
sip float through Bernhard's routines. But her technique is not the
tiresome sterile irony of postmodernist "appropriation." On the con-
trary, she daringly explores a raw, stormy emotionalism, sudden
tantrums that repel or terrify.

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The task of the artist and intellectual at the end of the century
is to rework the discontinuities of our lives into new wholes. How
can we clarify our thinking about this pagan Age of Hollywood?
French and German theory won't do. We need a native language
of sensory analysis.

Bernhardt operatic surrealism is a good start in this direction.
She combines the modernist themes of desolation and abandonment
with the spirituality of black music and the hostile but affirmative
energies of rock. She has the sophisticated worldliness of gay men
and the gorgeous theatricality of drag queens. With Boskovich, she
is rescuing gay identity from its excessive politicization and reorient-
ing it toward culture.

Above all, Bernhard is reinventing feminism. While the once-
pioneering Lily Tomlin has become the high priestess of political
correctness, Bernhard embraces the great female personae excluded
by the prudish Stcinem politburo: bitch, stripper, whore, lady, fash-
ion model.

The evolved Bernhard is a wonderful influence on young au-
diences. Her new feminist is a powerful, self-reliant personality with
a sharp, bawdy tongue. Like the drag queen, she can defend herself
without running to grievance committees. Whether lesbian or bi-
sexual, she accepts and respects male lust without trying to censor
it. And she knows that comedy is the best road to truth.

BROOKLYN NEFERTITi:
BARBRA STREISAND

One of the supreme moments in recent popular entertainment
was when Barbra Streisand sang ' 'Evergreen" for Bill Clinton at his
inauguration gala. All of her American fans were saying to ourselves:
"Look at what we've missed for the past twenty-five years!" She
looked spectacular, wearing a business suit with big padded shoul-
ders and a long skirt slit up the thigh. I was delirious. She was all
man and all woman.

It was a return to her roots, to the unconventional, somewhat
androgynous persona she had at the beginning of her career in the
early 1960s. She's gone full circle. There is a wonderful unity and
simplicity about Streisand's current persona. Even her speaking style
has been resimplified and become clearer and stronger. I love the
fact that she's retaken the public stage as a political figure. Until a
couple of years ago, when she made The Prince of Tides, many people
were tired of her. I was impatient with her erratic productivity and
the middlebrow drift of her taste. But now she is a splendid role
model for women: a mega-celebrity who is also politically engaged.

[An interview with Rebecca Mead, cover story, Sunday Times magazine,
London, May 30, 1993. Another article by Paglia on Streisand appeared
too late for inclusion in this volume: The New Republic, July 18, 1994.]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Many people question her motives and find her posture ludi-
crous. They say that she's getting involved in politics for the sake
of fashion, trimming her sails for the moment, that she's a White
House sycophant and hanger-on. But in point of fact, her political
commitment long predates the rise of Clinton. She is an authentic
heir of leftist politics in America. Her beliefs can be traced to her
origins in ethnic, working-class Brooklyn. She came out of the cru-
cible of Jewish political activism.

Streisand's radical politics go back to the passionate Jewish
liberalism that pervaded 1950s avant-garde circles and descended
in turn from labor-union agitation in the 1930s. Greenwich Village
in the late 1950s and early 1960s was seething with folk singers, and
many of the populist songs being performed in coffee houses were
labor protest songs of the 1930s. In a sense, Streisand is coming out
of that. Even her crisp, emphatic diction is immediately recognizable
as the old voice of Jewish political activism.

When she first exploded upon the world in the early 1960s in
Funny Girl, what Streisand represented was an electrifying new in-
dividualism that looked forward to the Sixties counterculture. The
nonconformism of her sexual persona was so radical compared to
what we had been raised with for the prior fifteen years, with all
those cheerful, sanitized blondes, such as Doris Day and Debbie
Reynolds. There was a whole series of blonde nymphettes, such as
Carol Lynley and Sandra Dee, prefiguring the Barbie doll. They
were sweet, docile, winsome, harmless, very attentive and deferential
to men.

What was so amazing about Streisand was her aggressive eth-
nicity. The Nose, which she refused to have changed, was so defiantly
ethnic. It was a truly revolutionary persona. She was a brilliant new
icon of modern womanhood. She was the first public figure to wear
retro clothes from the 1930s. This "thrift-shop look" became a hippie
style later adopted by Janis Joplin. Streisand made the cover of Time
magazine as a gamine waifish outsider and then was treated my-
thologically by Life magazine; she posed as a haughty Nefertiti and
as a Regency siren in Greek dress.

While in high school, I went through a rabid Streisand period,
when I slept on giant rollers to get my hair like hers and had long
nails with plum polish. Early Streisand remains for me the best

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Streisand. She visibly seethed with emotion. When drag queens
imitate her, it's always from that period, with that smooth, sleek
helmet hair, when she was still singing in cabarets.

There has always been a conflict in Barbra Streisand, as in
Oscar Wilde, between her populist politics and her aristocratic and
tyrannical persona. In early pictures, with her hair swept back, she
looks so grand, like a Russian duchess. This is what gay guys liked
about her — the arrogant, monarchical divahood, which is definitely
not democratic. Streisand has always been a kind of drag queen
herself. That's true of Sandra Bernhard too, and it's true of me and
of a lot of women who didn't feel particularly feminine when they
were growing up. For women like that, by the time you figure out
what femininity is, you've become a female impersonator.

I've written in Sexual Personae that all the great stars imitated
by gay men — Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Diana Ross,
Joan Collins, and Barbra Streisand — are androgynous. They are
men-women, with this tremendous duality. That's why their ro-
mantic relationships are so bad, because they are autocratic and
autonomous. As artists, they need no one else.

I was so excited when it was announced that Streisand would
appear in male drag in Yentl (1983). But she pulled her punches,
and I was disappointed. Amy Irving, playing the girl who fell in
love with Streisand as the disguised yeshiva student, was meltingly
sexual, but when it came to the kiss, Streisand shrouded it in shadow.
She undercut her own persona. There is a male part of her that is
palpably there, but she's unwilling to really go for it. Perhaps she
is so uncertain of her sexuality that she fears compromising it.

Streisand's insecurity about her sexual attractiveness is probably
one of the reasons she stopped performing live for two decades.
Audiences had started to call her "cold" on stage. She always felt
like the homely, cross-eyed child from Brooklyn. But how rare it
was to have the nonconformist ugly duckling elevated to the central
role of major Hollywood films. When Streisand appeared in The Way
We Were (1973) with Robert Redford, people cattily commented on
how much prettier the male star was than the female. Probably it
was psychologically important for Streisand to withdraw in the 1970s
and 1980s and become a hausfrau. She wanted to live like a real
woman, and to be desired like one.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Unfortunately, she eclipsed her own persona in that domestic
period, when she was constantly redecorating and meat-shopping
and cooking for her man. It was embarrassing. She had reverted to
convention and become what the 1950s wanted us to be, a housewife
and mother. I suffered every time I saw her in that atrocious mop
of curls. She looked terrible.

Her longtime boyfriend, hairdresser-turned-producer Jon Pe-
ters, first got to Streisand when he was visiting her house and said,
as she was walking in front of him, "Nice ass." She was thrilled that
a good-looking man was relating to her as a sexual being, because
she was very insecure about this.

In terms of twentieth-century popular culture, Streisand is a
unique sexual persona. Fanny Brice, whom she was playing in Funny
Girl, was a superb stage comedian, but she never had the status of
a sexual being. There are different ways to break conventions, of
course. Jean Harlow did a slutty, trashy kind of thing: she had a
working-class street sexuality that sharply contrasted with the ele-
gant cosmopolitanism of her Hollywood contemporaries. Streisand's
greatness is that she was able to inject the madcap Fanny Brice
persona with all the sensuality and glamour of the great stars.

To me, Streisand is a duchess, a queen, a tyrant. That is the
persona she created in Hollywood. She has a reputation for being
a bitch because of her perfectionism and desire for total control over
every production. She is like Catherine the Great, a woman of au-
tocratic power, who ruled alone and was a shrewd political operator,
intolerant of any invasion of her turf.

Streisand's craving for autonomy became a problem for her,
since she never learned how to collaborate. The same thing has
happened to Madonna. Such artists start out so individualistic, fol-
lowing their own instincts; but the point comes when they are so
used to doing their own thing and not seeking advice from good
people that they screw up. It happened with Madonna over the
disastrous Sex book, and it happened with Streisand in A Star Is Born
(1976) — a fascinating film but in many ways ludicrous; she was both
the star and the producer.

Streisand is in the Katharine Hepburn/Bette Davis tradition of
women who just spoke out and took the consequences. She is some-
one who is totally self-determined and doesn't care what people think

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of her. Streisand's on-screen persona is quite unlike that of either
Hepburn or Davis, but the way those stars defined the Hollywood
establishment in the 1930s and 1940s is very much like Streisand's
independent off-screen persona. Streisand's predecessors are prewar;
no one was behaving like that after the war.

While Streisand has to be respected for the genuineness of her
political beliefs, one is entitled to be somewhat skeptical of any
ambitions she might have for elective office (the rumors are incon-
clusive about this). The idea of Senator Streisand may be risible.
At this point, it is absurd, inconceivable. She has not lived the
political life and learned the skills of negotiation and compromise
that you need to succeed in office and to communicate with ordinary
people.

I think Streisand is a Jesse Jackson figure, someone who is not
very good at the day-to-day grind and banal minutiae of being a
politician but who has a gift for giving big, stirring, kick-in-the-ass
speeches that move multitudes. Now, at midlife and seasoned by
experience, Streisand has a great public role to play, even if you
don't agree with what she is saying. For example, even those who
support gay liberation, as I do, may not agree with her controversial
call for a boycott of the entire state of Colorado because of an anti-
gay law passed there.

Streisand has now become a grande dame, like Lady Bracknell
in The Importance of Being Earnest. The thundering majesty of the
Victorian dowagers has been sadly missing from women's sexual
personae throughout the twentieth century. Streisand's imperious
oratorical manner seems wonderful to me, as a feminist who has
been trying to bury forever our Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds past.

LOLIT A UNCLOTHED

A girl's hand drops a needle onto a spinning 45 rpm disk in a tiny box record
player. Sarah Vaughan's rahishly flirtatious "Let's" begins to play, as the
camera pulls back to show a pubescent blonde girl in denim pedal pushers ,
ankle sox, and ballerina slippers, leafing through movie magazines. Absent-
mindedly twirling her hair around her fingers, she lies on her stomach, with
her feet up and her ankles fetchingly crossed. Perched on the open lid of the
record player are a pair of red-rimmed, heart-shaped sunglasses. Cut to a
darkened, shrine-like set hung with a large yellow painting of the face of an
adolescent girl wearing the same sunglasses. Her eyes peer provocatively over
the green glass, and there is a bright blue lollipop resting between her parted,
sensuous, very red lips. Across the top of the painting, the name "Lolita" is
scrawled like a signature, with a heart dotting the "i. " CAMILLE PAG LI A,
in black sweater and pants, steps out of the shadows and mounts the platform
in a somewhat pugnacious manner.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Nabokov's novel is a final corruption of the tra-
dition of the veneration of the child that in fact was created by
Rousseau and Wordsworth at the birth of Romanticism. The

[A Rapido TV production for World Without Walls, Channel 4, London.
Produced and directed by Peter Stuart. Aired May 11, 1993.]

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child was now considered sexless and saintly. Freud tried a
hundred years ago to redefine the infant and child as fully sexual,
but that idea has never taken. It is too appalling to most parents
to really imagine that there's a sexual dynamic going on between
themselves and their children. So this, as far as I'm concerned,
this motif of childhood sexuality, is the last taboo.

( Cut to 1966 black-and-white film of a relaxed VLADIMIR NABOKOV, wear-
ing eyeglasses, dramatically reading from a copy o/" Lolita (1955), open on a
table before him.)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My
sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of
three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo.
Lee. Ta."

( Cut to shot of the page, then back to PAGLIA on set.)

PAGLIA: "Lola" is traditionally a great name — as in Lola Montez —
for a courtesan figure, going back to the nineteenth century and
in fact earlier. "Lolita," the diminutive, already implies a kind
of infantilization of this figure of adult sexuality. So I think
there's a kind of child's play, a sort of breaking of the taboo, a
profanation of childhood language, nursery rhymes even in the
name "Lo-lee-ta" (draws it out lasciviously).

(Cut to black-and-white newsreel footage of the premiere of the film of Lolita
in New York in 1961. Stentorian, Walter Winchell-like commentary by MI-
CHAEL FITZMAURICE for News of the Day. Headline: "Lights! Cameras!
Premiere in Manhattan." Pan of Times Square on a rainy evening. Under the
huge marquee of Loew's State are crowds behind police barriers and surging
photographers popping flashbulbs.)

MICHAEL FITZMAURICE: Broadway at dusk! And as the lights go
on, the News of the Day camera records the welcome for Lolita,
the film the whole town's talking about! There is acclaim in the
film world for Stanley Kubrick, director of Lolita, arriving with
Mrs. Kubrick. (Film of the Kubricks exiting their limousine. An um-
brella is held out by a uniformed male usher wearing Lolita 9 s heart-shaped
glasses.) And now, Sue Lyon and James Mason. The capable
young actress, who was fourteen when she received the nod to

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

play the title role in Lolita, shares the plaudits of the critics and
movie fans with Mr. Mason, a veteran of many great starring
performances. (Sue Lyon, in a sensational platinum-blonde bubble
hairdo, is paternally supported by the suave James Mason. Also visible
are Joan Fontaine, in a chignon and fur stole, escorted by Robert Stack.)

(Cut to stark black-and-white movie promo: "How did they make a movie
of. . . Lolita?" Collage of Sue Lyon- as -Lolita photos flash by. Cut to London
journalist SUZANNE MOORE.J

SUZANNE MOORE: When I think of Lolita, I always think of those
heart-shaped sunglasses. When my young daughter wanted
some sunglasses, we went into the shop, and they had all dif-
ferent shapes — they had heart shapes and star shapes, you know,
for thirty pence, kids' plastic sunglasses. And I bought her —
she was really little, about two or three, I think — these little
heart-shaped ones, and this friend of mine said, "What are you
doing? What are you doing, putting those on her?'" Because for
him it just signified so strongly a kind of sexual — a sexualization.
It was the equivalent of putting a little girl in stockings or
something. It just wasn't done.

(Cut to the most famous scene from the film, Lolita. In a bikini, sunglasses,
and huge sunhat, Sue Lyon is languorously stretched out on the lawn, reading
while her transistor radio blares Nelson Riddle's "Lolita Ya Ya. " The raucous
voice of Shelley Winters as her landlady-mother is heard extolling the virtues
of the establishment to a prospective tenant, James Mason as HUMBERT
HUM BERT J

CHARLOTTE (Lolita s mother): My flowers win prizes around here!
They're the talk of the neighborhood. Voila! My yellow roses,
my — uh, oh — my daughter. Darling, turn that down, please.
(HUMBERT, startled and immediately transfixed, stares at LOLITA.
Turning down the radio with a petulant moue, she returns his gaze un-
flinchingly, then slowly removes her sunglasses. They continue staring, as
her mother chatters on.) I can offer you a comfortable home, a
sunny garden, a congenial atmosphere, my cherry pies —

HUMBERT (dumbfounded): Well, uh

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( Cut to author ANNE RICE, regally seated in a sumptuous green-velvet chair
next to a fireplace with a crackling blaze.)

ANNE RICE: What Lolita has become today is the image of the se-
ductive young girl who is every man's dream of sensuality. That
wasn't what the real Lolita was in Nabokov's novel at all. She
was a very ordinary girl who didn't herself have profound sexual
feelings and never really enjoyed the illicit relationship with
Humbert Humbert, but that's been forgotten. When people
speak of a Lolita today, they mean (she grins) a hot little number.

( Cut to a montage of art works showing blossoming young girls in subliminally
or overtly provocative poses: Jourdan's The Young Sea Nymph (1870),
Bouguereau's On the Bank of the Ruisseau (1888), Mary Cassatt's Little
Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878), Balthus' Katia Reading (1976).)

PAGLIA (on set): Culture seems to follow patterns of innocence and
then cynicism. Because even in our own time there has been a
great evolution in our attitudes toward what is now called child
pornography. Many of the great art works of the Renaissance
had kiddie porn elements, in particular the great David of Don-
atello (statue shown), which today would get Donatello arrested
and taken off in a paddy wagon! In the mid-nineteenth century
there was a tradition of painters and photographers, like Lewis
Carroll, for taking pictures of young girls totally nude (a montage
of seven photos) or placed in historical situations, with costumes
and so on revealing the nude body in ways that would seem to
us today, after Freud, as enormously perverse and sexualized.
But this is part of the tradition of Romanticism, of looking at
woman and the female principle as being innocent and pure.
It's part of the heritage of Rousseau and Wordsworth. Such
things are impossible now, because we have so resexualized the
image of the child. This is a profound cultural problem that we
still are wrestling with.

(Cut to The Face magazine cover of Kate Moss, proclaimed "This year's
model." Cut to KEVIN KOLLENDA, model agent for Take 2.)

KEVIN KOLLENDA: I think there is a definite Lolita syndrome we're
seeing in fashion today. You're seeing an innocence reborn. It's

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

the doey-eyed expression, the beautiful lips, the clear skin, the
freshness. (Magazine covers shown.) And I think that's why the
market's gone out after it — because it's a whole new approach.
There are girls that nobody's ever seen before. (Film of Jocelyn,
a new "waif" model, at a photo shoot.) There is the woman inside
her that comes out. And I think that's needed in the photos,
because otherwise it would look like a little girl wearing Mom-
my's clothes or wearing some older woman's clothes. There is
the knowing in her eyes, the awareness of her womanhood, of
her sexuality that I think is combined with her youthfulness. I
think that's the magic of this whole look right now. It is quite
virginal, the whole approach. It's very new; it's very clean. It's
very moralistic — in a world that maybe right now is lacking in
some morals!

(Cut to a bubbling bottle of Coca-Cola. The camera pans up to reveal moist
red lips suggestively wrapped around a straw.)

PAGLIA: The 1950s were a period when young girls were expected
to be virgins in America. Then my generation of the 1960s broke
through and was overtly sexual. Now what's happened in the
generation since the 1960s is quite remarkable. There has been
a lowering of the age of overt sexuality in the personae of young
women in America. There's a kind of shopping-mall style in
junior-high-school and high-school girls that has led to the Amy
Fisher case in this country.

(Cut to television news film of Fisher's 1992 sentencing.)

BAILIFF: All rise!

VOICE OF REPORTER (ABC's Jeff Greenfield): When eighteen-year-old
Amy Fisher was sentenced today for shooting the wife of her
alleged lover, the judge acknowledged the obvious.

JUDGE: To some people, you have become a media celebrity.

PAGLIA (on set): Amy Fisher, in her personal style — a kind of slutty,
trashy shopping-mall style — absolutely embodies the American
version of Lolita. Right from early on, headlines in America
were screaming "Long Island Lolita." (Front pages of New York

Post, Daily News, andNew York Newsday: "Young Gun/' "Laugh-
ing Lolita," "D-Dayfor Amy/ 3 "Why was I ever born?") It was an
amazing resurgence of this image in popular culture here. I think
what's so fascinating to me in the Amy Fisher case is the way
you have this face-off on a porch between this seventeen-year-
old girl and this suburban mother, and they were fighting, es-
sentially, for territoriality over this man, all right? (Film of Mary
Jo Buttafuoco, the wounded wife, pressing through a mob of reporters in
the courthouse hallway. Then Joey Buttafuoco cursing photographers out-
side his Long Island home.) Every one of these great crime stories
or great sexually sensationalistic stories is showing the actual
reality — the unstable reality of human sexuality.

(Back to Fisher's sentencing. Somewhat rumpled and nervous, she listens to
the judge's statement, her face a strange mixture of fear and fascination.)

JUDGE: Motivated by lust and passion, you were a walking stick of
dynamite with the fuse lit.

( On screen: "Amy Fisher is serving five to fifteen years for attempted murder. ")

PAGLIA: Nabokov's Lolita, which seemed very sensationalistic and out
of sync with the times in the mid-1950s, now seems to be almost
a documentary record of the kind of pornographic real-life cases
that have spilled over into the media in the Nineties.

( Cut to amusing clip from the film Lolita. HUMBERT is wedged between
LOLITA and her mother in the front seat of a car at a drive-in, where a horror
movie is playing. As screams peal from the screen, both women clutch at
HUMBERT^ knee. LOLITA — to her mother's surprise and annoyance — ends
up with HUMBERTS hands sandwiched between her own.)

ANNE RICE: Children are definitely sexual beings. They're sexual
beings from the time they're little, bitty babies, and of course
we have to protect them. We have to look out for them. We
don't want to put them at the mercy of adult sexuality. That
would be a terribly overwhelming and unfair thing to do. And
there have to be laws to protect children, but to deny that they
have any sexual feelings at all is monstrous. To talk to fifteen-and
sixteen-year-old girls as if they have no desire themselves is
perfectly insane! To lead them to believe that the appropriate

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role for them is that of a passive victim when they reach the
age of seventeen and eighteen is nonsense.

(Voice of a contemporary actor reading an excerpt from Lolita, while vintage
Fifties film shows adolescent girls primping and preening amid sewing machines
in home economics class and then modeling sports skirts in a fashion show.)

HUMBERT: "Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur
maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many
times older than they, reveal their true nature. The little deadly
demon among wholesome children, she stands unrecognized by
them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."

paglia: I think the Lolita story forces us to face the fact that the
girl in these adult-child relationships may not be the innocent
that she seems, that there is a complicated game being played
under the surface. Because I have heard repeatedly from mothers
that there are certain daughters born to them who learn how
to twist Daddy around their little finger from the moment they
can walk, all right? I think there may in fact possibly be even a
flirtation gene. I myself was born without it!

(Cut to contemporary actors playing HUMBERT and LOLITA, who is non-
chalantly chewing gum. Obsessed, he stares at her, while she slowly blows a
big pink bubble until it bursts with a pop. Cut to clip from Vincente MinnellVs
film Gigi (1958) . Dressed like a dandy with top hat and cane, MAURICE CHE-
VALIER sits on a park bench in Paris, as Gigi (Leslie Caron) plays tag with
other schoolgirls.)

MAURICE CHEVALIER: This story is about a little girl. It could be
any one of those little girls playing there. But it isn't. It's about
one in particular — that one. Her name is Gigi . . . Gigi. (Laughs
suggestively.) What you have to look forward to, Gigi! (Chuckles
and sings.) Those little eyes so helpless and appealing/ One day
will flash and send you crashing through the ceiling. /Thank
heaven for little girls ..."

PAGLIA: I don't think there is quite as sharp a borderline in France
between childhood and adult sexuality as there is in England
and America. It's therefore no surprise to me that the Lolita
motif has continued as a French archetype all these decades

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since the period of Brigitte Bardot. ( Clips from early Bardot films)
I find very attractive in French culture the overt sexual grace
and frank acknowledgment of sensuality in young French
women.

(As a woman looks on, the ebullient, teenaged Bardot is whirled round in the
arms of a brawny man, who carries her away.)

WOMAN: She's enchanting!

MAN (domineeringly): She's — she's such a baby!

( Cut to film of seven-year-old blonde Bardot lookalike VANESSA PARADIS
singing on French television.)

VANESSA PARADIS (lisping charmingly): Et mime la lune . . . vivre avec
nous la vie . . . (forgets words, trails off, and giggles).

HOST: Tu fais un peu de danse? Tu fais un peu de danse, non? [You'll do
a little dance?]

PARADIS: Oui. [Yes.]

ANNOUNCER: De la dance classique? [Classical dance?]

PARADIS: Rhythmique. [Modern dance.]

ANNOUNCER: Fais moi voir commencer! [Go ahead, show me!]

( Cut to moody, blue- toned music video of a fifteen-year-old Paradis, now with
full-scale, petulant Bardot lips. She slowly washes her face with water from
a basin, pats herself dry with a towel, and stretches out languidly on a bed.)

SUZANNE MOORE: Well, the last time I was in Paris, I just noticed
everywhere images of nymphets, if you like, of people like Va-
nessa Paradis. I think French women often are kept in a very
kind of infantile position within their families, and that's re-
flected in a kind of sexual imagery that you see there.

(Cut to NANCY HONEY, photographer, in London.)

NANCY HONEY: It was interesting that when I recently had an ex-
hibition of a lot of different pieces of my work in France, they
certainly had no problem when it came to how the images would
be read. And I just thought that was so different and refreshing,

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VAMPS Be TRAMPS

after all this confusion for the last five years, where I felt that
I had to constantly rationalize my work and my feelings about
my children. (Montage of her photos of her nude children.) And there
is a huge amount of sensuality in how I feel about them. But that
isn't sexual, and I think that that's where the difference lies. And
I do think that people have a lot of trouble with that hairline
difference between sexuality and sensuality. (She picks up a black-
and-white photo of Daisy and Jesse, aged seven and nine, touching hips.
Seen from behind, their backs and buttocks resemble those of marble Greek
kouros sculptures.) This image here, when this was exhibited, as
part of a larger exhibition — I went to one of the exhibition
organizers and said I thought that this would be a wonderful
image for the poster. And she just completely freaked out and
said that there was absolutely no way this could ever be used for
a poster in any sense, and she mentioned the word "pedophilia."
And I was really shocked. (She picks up a photograph of Daisy, at
eight, peering through tumbled hair half obscuring her face.) And another
exhibition organizer looked at this one, and she'd been leafing
through the photographs and saying that she liked them, and
she said, didn't I think that I'd "constructed" this in a "Lolita-
ish" way? And again, I was completely dumbfounded! I really
didn't know what to say because it had never even occurred to me.
I've had lots of comments about, you know — well, obviously
you posed her with her hair over her eyes to make her look at
the camera in a soft porn pose — which, to be honest with you,
I mean, I didn't. It was a look that she had a lot of the time, and
you can see it in family snaps — if you care to look through my
family album! So I didn't have a problem with this image. And
although I think that this one (displays a photo of her son, in a
dreamy pose, at ten) could be misconstrued in exactly the same
way, no one's ever mentioned a word about this one being a
sexual image because, perhaps, of him being a boy.

ANNE RICE: I don't think there's any danger in using children in
art. I think it'll always be confusing. There'll always be a heavy
note of seductiveness in it, you know. And if you look at the old
Pear's soap commercials with the beautiful little girl (cut to Pear's
advertisement), that's a sexy little girl. Now there's nothing really

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dirty or ugly about that. It's beautiful. But she's cuddly, and
she's sensuous, and it's a gateway to something. But, I mean,
you're not meant to open that gate and go that way, you know?
That's the idea. But if we get too puritanical and we try to stamp
out any use of children in art, I think that would be a terrible
thing. Children exist.

(Cut to photographs from Immediate Family, Sally Mann's pictures of her
children. One little girl, playing Sorry, has an off-the-shoulder blouse; another
holds a pretend cigarette; another, clutching a doll, wears heart-shaped sun-
glasses. A half-nude boy gracefully poses with hand on bare hip; his wrist
seems tied by black thongs. In the last picture, a girl who may or may not be
nude stands in roller skates on a darkened porch, her hand falling near her
crotch.)

PAGLIA: I feel the function of the modern artist is precisely to shatter
all taboos and that where the subject of the art work causes the
most pain, that is where the artist is contributing the most to
civilization.

( Cut to pastoral scene, Barley Splatt, Cornwall. Water spills into a stream,
which mirrors the stone, fortress-like country home of GRAHAM OVENDEN,
artist.)

GRAHAM OVENDEN: One of the great problems at the moment is the
actual automatic association of sexuality with sexual abuse in
children. (OVENDEN is shown sitting in his studio among his paintings
of nude prepubescent girls.) I mean, it's just patent and complete
and utter nonsense. I think that the two have become so in-
grained in the popular imagery, in the tabloid imagery, it's going
to be very difficult for children in fact to have any normal un-
derstanding of their sexual selves.

This conversation in Germany or France, in fact, would be
a non-starter, because the problems and the neuroses which we
are talking about is a peculiar Anglo-Saxon problem, as far as
one can tell, (gestures at two nude paintings) This is a pair of com-
missioned portraits which I am working on at the moment, and
they happen to be German girls. And they happen to come from
one of the most famous German families! (laughs) I don't feel
the slightest desire, in fact — apart from doing straight por-

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

traits — of doing nudes of children in Anglo-Saxon countries. I
suppose in a way one could say I'm being chicken by saying
that, but we've actually reached a point in this country where
it becomes equivocal whether in fact one is actually doing some-
thing legally.

The present morality is a very cloaking one. Instead of the
figure growing outwards in all its sort of state of grace, its clarity
and its purity, it is cloaked. It's taken back into darkness, into
the shadows. I mean, I don't bring nudity into it. Nudity is totally
immaterial, because nudity is actually a state of purity — an ab-
solute state. (The camera pans other of his paintings, where nude young
girls boldly fix spookily intense eyes on the viewer.) This gaze, I mean,
this is one of the most precious and wonderful qualities which
you find in childhood. That stare, that clear-eyed stare in fact has
the universe in it. And there is that sort of emotional quality in
a child's look. I'd like on occasion to think of it as the child
staring out at you and saying, you know, "Beware. Do not cor-
rupt me." Perhaps because people are generally, shall we say,
emotional cowards. It worries them, that stare.

(Cut to ANDREW SAMUELS, Jungian analyst in London.)

ANDREW SAMUELS: If you start to look at Lolita — the theme, the
syndrome, as well as the book — from the point of view of males
in crisis, then something new happens to our thinking. Let me
explain what I mean. If you look at Lolita from the point of
view of a clapped out, valueless, spiritually empty, middle-aged,
middle-class professional — people like you, me, and a lot of the
viewers of this program — then what you start to see is the way
Lolita, the image, carries a certain kind of hope. Hope for a
spiritual regeneration, hope for a connection with something
deeper.

(Cut to actors portraying HUMBERT and LOLITA. As he leafs through a
magazine, she is chewing gum, toying with her hair, and scratching her shin.
Voice-over of extract from Lolita. )

HUMBERT: "My innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting
position on my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm
hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth; I felt the

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heat of her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. And all at
once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth
with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even
close her eyes as Hollywood teaches."

(Cut to KIM MORRISSEY, author of Poems For Men Who Dream of
LolitaJ

KIM MORRISSEY: Lolita is a book where the fictional character of
Dolores — Lolita — has no voice. And you never hear her side of
the story. And so there's a great desire, I think, for women to
have those voices that are traditionally left out of literature
heard. When I wrote these poems, I wanted people to never be
able to say the word "Lolita" again and use it in the cliched
way that we have. (She reads from her book. Dreamlike footage of girl
on a swing is superimposed on her face, accompanied by distorted play-
ground shouts.) "Stepfather, somewhere between the dark stain
on the tiles and the towels heaped on the back of the toilet, you
rest your case. I may leave if I want. Today you are giving me
choices. I watch my head turn in the mirror, thin hair finger-
brushed back, tied low on my neck like a bow, taste your hair
at the back of my throat, tightly wound wires riding the tip of
my tongue. Today is a day we make choices. You or the foster
home. You or the chair."

PAGLIA (on set): I would maintain that the novel contains a cloaked
incest drama. That in fact there is a masked father figure —
Humbert — in this story that expresses the eternal conundrum
of the incest taboo in our culture. We must recall that the two
greatest plays in Western history, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and
Shakespeare's Hamlet, contain incest themes. We seem to be
returning to this problem again and again.

( Cut to film clip from Lolita. Sue Lyon as LOLITA, chomping crackers, is
perched in a window, with her feet flirtatiously up on a table at which James
Mason as HUMBERT is dolefully sitting.)

HUMBERT: I will never give away any of your secrets.

LOLITA: You wouldn't?

HUMBERT: I promise.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

LOLITA: Oh! Well for that, you get a little reward.

HUMBERT: Oh, thank you very much.

LOLITA: Here. (She dangles a large slice of fish over his mouth.)

HUMBERT (fatigued, exasperated): Oh, no, please. No — Lolita. No.

LOLITA: Put your head back. Put your head back! Open your mouth.
You can have one little bite! (He suddenly grips her wrist and takes a
big bite.)

CHARLOTTE (puzzled, then anxious at the foot of the stairs): Lolita! Lolita!

PAGL1A: We're faced with a conundrum, a paradox here at the end
of the century. We want to draw the father into the family unit
closer and closer. Fathers now freely push strollers in a way that
would have been embarrassing for them in the 1950s. But now,
how close is too close? ( Cut to contemporary reenactment of LOLITA
clumsily applying lipstick in a mirror. HUMBERT hovers intently in the
background of her reflection.) Just what are the boundary lines of
acceptable physical behavior between fathers and children?

NANCY HONEY: Lots of dads have actually told me that they now
feel that they can't even touch their eight-, nine-, ten-year-old
girls without feeling that somehow there's something wrong with
it. And it's, I think, more dangerous to stop physical closeness
for a father and daughter, or for a father and son, than it is to
be so worried about it. (Cut to intimate portrait of HONEY husband
and son)

ANDREW SAMUELS: There is something mutually enriching and en-
hancing in the communications between father and daughter
that stress, above all, the potential erotic liability of the daugh-
ter. What we're badly lacking, and urgently need to develop,
are texts that stress positive aspects of the erotically charged
relationship between daughter and father. (Cut to reenactment of
HUMBERT gently kissing LOLITA 's forehead) What / would want
to do is to reconnect Lolita — and our worries about Lolita are
justifiable and understandable worries about a veritable explosion
of Lolita-ism in Western culture — I'd want to connect that back
to ordinary benevolent erotics in the family.

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( Cut to film of Nabokov in shorts, prowling mountain meadows with a butterfly
net. He deftly traps a butterfly, inspects it, then releases it.)

PAGLIA: Nabokov's novel was like a hand grenade thrown into the
middle of the 1950s, blowing apart this kind of tranquil, settled,
unexamined relationship between parents and children. In Lo-
lita, Nabokov created a character who would come to symbolize
the removal, in the final decades of this century, of the line that
history had drawn between childhood and adult sexuality. We
are now in the center of a sexual storm. It remains to be seen
whether that line, artificial and repressive as it was, was not in
fact in the best interests of culture.

( Cut to legs of the girl in the opening scene. She is twisting her hair around
her fingers. We hear Sarah Vaughan singing ( 'Let's fall in love right here and
now. 33 The girl lifts the needle from the spinning 45, abruptly stopping the
music. Cut to reenactment of HUMBERT watching LOLITA blow an enormous
bubble. It pops into a black-out.)

MASTERS AND
M ISTRESSES

DIANA REGINA

With the release of Andrew Morton's book, Diana: Her True
Story, the decade-long Diana cult has become more than a senti-
mental fairy tale. Morton's book, first published in June, created a
publicity storm unprecedented even for naughty, tell-all celebrity
biographies. The June 7 edition of the Sunday Times of London, which
contained the first serialized excerpt, sold a record number of issues,
up 21 percent from the regular 1,143,000 sale. In the United States,
the issue of People that contained the first excerpt for American
audiences sold 4,001,100 copies, a record in the magazine's eighteen-
year history. Simon and Schuster had to double its 200,000-copy
print run of Diana within days of publication. The book flew to the
top of The New York Times best-seller list, which also contains, at
fifth place, a recent book by Lady Colin Campbell, Diana in Private,
and at fifteenth, Nicholas Davies's Diana: A Princess and Her Troubled
Marriage.

The book was shrouded in secrecy during production, but tan-
talizing tidbits began to leak out in the week before its serialization
by the Sunday Times. The marriage of the Prince and Princess of

[Cover story, The New Republic, August 3, 1992]

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Wales was over. Diana, weakened by bulimia, had tried to kill herself
five times. Charles flaunted a mistress. There would be a divorce,
a constitutional crisis, the collapse of the monarchy. The editor of
the Sunday Times, denounced by members of Parliament and royalist
hangers-on, stoutly defended the authenticity of the book, whose on-
the-record sources arc of unprecedented closeness to Diana, includ-
ing her brother, Viscount Althorp. Because the book also uses a
large number of unpublished family photographs, there was spec-
ulation that Diana herself had cooperated, however discreetly, with
its production.

But as the American response to the news shows, the fascination
with Diana is more than a British phenomenon. It is an international
obsession whose scale and longevity show that it is more than high-
class soap opera or a reactionary wish-fulfillment fantasy for Amer-
ican Anglophiles. Those who have never taken Diana seriously
should take a new look. With this latest burst of press attention,
Diana may have become the most powerful image in world popular
culture today, a case study in the modern cult of celebrity and the
way it stimulates atavistic religious emotions. It is increasingly ob-
vious that Diana's story taps into certain deep and powerful strains
in our culture, strains that suggest that the ancient archetypes of
conventional womanhood are not obsolete but stronger and deeper
than ever.

Cinderella. When we first met her, Diana was a shy, blushing
teenager who had landed the world's most eligible bachelor, a dash-
ing Prince Charming with a throne in his future. Morton's book
reveals that Diana is Cinderella in more ways than one. Despite her
privileged background, she had a desultory finishing-school edu-
cation and earned money doing odd jobs as a charlady — 'Vacuum-
ing, dusting, ironing, and washing." Bizarrely, we actually see her
"on her knees cleaning the kitchen floor" as she chats with a chum
about her weekend plans. The Cinderella analogy continues in the I
way Diana is pushed around and undermined by real and step
relations: her bossy, fast-track sister Sarah, her ruthless, showy step-
mother Raine, and the snippy female royals. She is stonewalled,
outwitted, criticized, particularly by a stiff and censorious Queen ,
Mother, who had been publicly portrayed during the engagement
as Diana's benevolent elder mentor.

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1 65

The betrayed wife. Morton's book confirms rumors that have
floated around for years about Charles's long-term mistress, Camilla
Parker-Bowles, whom Charles dated before her marriage in 1973 to
an army officer who is now Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen, a
peculiarly suggestive Tudor honorific. We now learn that Charles
hardly spent a moment alone with Diana during the engagement.
She seems to have been selected with clinical detachment as a brood
mare to carry on the Windsor line. Like Mia Farrow in Rosemary's
Baby, tricked and maneuvered into impregnation by Satan, she is
isolated and conspired against by a faithless husband in league with
a secretive, coldly smiling coterie. Most intolerably, her suitability
as a mate was approved by Camilla herself, who deemed Diana the
least threatening of rivals. Charles even proposed to Diana in the
Parker-Bowles garden, as if under his mistress's aegis.

We are certainly getting only one side of the story. It is unlikely
that the mature, athletic, tally-ho Camilla, whom Diana cattily calls
the "rottweiler," is as merciless and scheming as she is presented
here. But the tales we are told — photographs of Camilla falling out
of Charles's diary, Charles on the royal honeymoon sporting new
cuff links from Camilla with two "Cs" intertwined, Diana over-
hearing Charles in his bathtub professing eternal love to Camilla on
his portable telephone, Camilla boldly presiding as hostess at the
married Charles's country estate — inevitably make us sympathize
with the young, fragile, and self-doubting Diana. Like Isabel Archer
in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Diana is an ingenue subtly
manipulated by a cynical matron, a sexual sophisticate of insidious
insideness.

The princess in the tower. Diana's story revives motifs of imperiled
or mourning femininity that flourished in Victorian poetry and paint-
ing but that one had thought long dead in this era of aggressively
career-oriented feminism. Having discharged his princely duty to
marry, Charles apparently cut himself off from Diana emotionally.
She seems orphaned, abandoned. Her old friends, outside the moat,
joke that "POW," Princess of Wales, really means "prisoner of war."
Languishing in plush solitude, Diana resembles a whole series of
melancholy pre-Raphaelite heroines painted by Holman Hunt and
John Everett Millais: Tennyson's lovelorn Lady of Shalott caught
in the threads of her loom, or his desolate Mariana, languidly stretch-

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ing herself in her blue velvet gown; or Keats's half-mad young lover
Isabella, watering the pot of basil with her tears. Like Andromeda
chained to the rock — the theme of one of Burnc-Jones's greatest
paintings — Diana is both imprisoned and exposed. She is trapped
in royal formulas of decorum, with the world's eyes upon her. Her
immediate predecessor is another Diana: Julie Christie in Darling as
a spirited young woman who leaves swinging Sixties London to
become an Italian principessa, only to be buried alive in grandiose
luxury and the unctuous obsequiousness of a hovering army of ser-
vants.

The mater dolorosa. Diana's children, William and Harry, give her
image stature. Without them, and her widely noted physical tend-
erness toward them, her marital complaints would seem far more
juvenile or petulant. It is ironic that Charles, who plucked Diana
from obscurity and who has all the weight of rank and wealth behind
him, seems helpless in the court of popular opinion against the
ancient archetype of the sorrowing mother or mater dolorosa, which
Christianity borrowed from the cult of Isis. Charles had sought and
found, in Morton's words, "a virginal Protestant aristocrat to be his
bride" only to discover that his philandering attempts to remain
himself produced a new Catholic Madonna, a modern Mary with a
taste for rock and roll.

"Diana in tears" was the caption on the June 29 cover of People
magazine — the second cover story in a row — which reproduced a
photo now seen everywhere of the Princess of Wales at her first
official appearance several days after the Times serialization began.
Head bowed and biting her lip, she seems visibly shaken, but no
tears are visible. This did not stop an American supermarket tabloid
from artificially adding a tear streak and enhancing the drops, so
that Diana resembles a Spanish Baroque Madonna with precious
crystal tears sparkling down her cheeks. Weeping Madonnas are
considered miraculous manifestations in Catholicism; like Diana,
they draw rapt and unruly crowds. Morton matter-of-factly reports
several dramatic instances of Diana's prophetic power to foretell
death or catastrophic illness. For example, she publicly predicted
her father's massive stroke the day before it happened, and she
said aloud, while watching Charles gallop on his horse, Allibar,

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

1 6T

that it was going to have a heart attack and die — which it imme-
diately did.

With the painful revelations of this book, Diana now assumes
the international position once held by Jacqueline Kennedy after
the assassination of her husband. Suffering redeems, and the world
honors grace under pressure. Diana's dislike of the sporting life at
Balmoral, the royal family's hallowed vacation retreat in Scotland,
recalls the soft-spoken Jackie's hard knocks in the early years of her
marriage: trying to fit in with the hyperkinetic, competitive, rough-
housing Kennedys, she broke her ankle in a touch-football game
and never went that route again. The supreme moment of Jackie's
public life was her dignified deportment at John Kennedy's funeral,
where, draped in a misty black veil, she stoically stood with her two
small children, gazing at the flag-draped casket. In Morton's book,
Diana is significantly shown alone with her children. Though she is
smiling, the somber black-and-white of the photographs suggests her
mourning for a dead marriage.

The pagan goddess. Diana's conflict with her husband's mistress
has Greco-Roman echoes unusual for the British royal family: Diana,
a fierce Italian goddess of the woods, versus Camilla, Virgil's Am-
azon, the militant Volscian horsewoman. A photo in Morton's book
shows the young Diana Spencer dreamily reading a hunting mag-
azine, The Field: The Stalking Review, with grazing stags on its cover.
The caption informs us, "While she has a reputation for being unen-
thusiastic about blood sports, Diana does enjoy stag hunting."
Throughout art history, the ancient Diana, hot on the chase with
her dogs, is almost invariably depicted with a stag or doe. Do names
contain their own fate?

The Hollywood queen. Morton tells us that Charles, exasperated
by his wife's "histrionics," has often accused her of feigning "mar-
tyrdom." Indeed, in reserved upper-class British terms, Diana's be-
havior has an operatic Mediterranean theatricality. In her quarrels
with Charles, the pregnant Diana threw herself down the San-
dringham staircase, where she was found by the "Queen Mum," as
the London dailies put it in June. On other occasions, she slashed
her wrists with a razor blade, cut herself with a lemon slicer, stabbed
herself in the chest and thighs with Charles's penknife, and hurled

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herself against a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace. These may
have been, as the Times headline said, "Cries for Help" rather than
serious suicide attempts, but Diana's lurid private exhibitionism, so
different from her public introversion, is reminiscent not only of the
sensually gory lives of the saints but of Hollywood at its garish high
point, the era of the "women's pictures" of Lana Turner, Susan
Hayward, and Jane Wyman, which featured flawed, gallant, tor-
mented women loyal to gorgeous but callow men.

The old Hollywood studio system was like the Vatican in the
way it manufactured stars and promoted its ornate ideology. The
House of Windsor still functions like a studio in the way it sequesters
its stars and subjects them to inhumane rules that make them more
than human. Although she is still called "Di" in America, as if she
were magically ever-virgin, Diana at her marriage ceased to be a
private person and became Her Royal Highness, the Princess of
Wales, one in a long succession of women holding that title. She
merged with her function. Similarly, the movements of the royals
are recorded daily in the Times under the rubric of their residences,
as if the palace itself has a greater living authority.

Diana's enormous glamour springs from the tension between
energy and structure. Going about her public duties, she radiates a
magnetic power that is directly produced by her disciplined con-
tainment within class and rank. Her staggering worldwide popu-
larity demonstrates the enduring power and significance of
hierarchy, a power that fashionable academic paradigms — influ-
enced by feminism, Marxism, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School —
cannot understand and whose enduring mystique can only be ex-
plained by Roman Catholicism or Hollywood history.

Diana's sole contemporary parallel as an international pop diva
is the second Madonna, who, like Diana, expresses herself best
through dance, the universal language. Both Diana and Madonna
have trouble with words, which fail them in public. Diana even
stumbled over her wedding vows, when she reversed the order of
Charles's names. It is remarkable how Diana has projected her
personality without the use of words. Photographs and video footage
arc her medium. She may be the last of the silent film stars. Morton's
book reveals Diana's secret private life as a solitary ballet dancer:
we see her gracefully poised en pointe on the rotting stone balustrades

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

1 69

at the "creepy" ancestral Althorp estate, which symbolize, as in Last
Year at Marienbad, the ambivalent burden of history. Diana's classical
dance training has given her an aplomb and distinction of carriage
that make for great photographs even when she is simply getting in
and out of cars — a talent conspicuously lacking in the lumbering,
bottom-heavy Sarah Ferguson. Like the great stars of the Hollywood
studio era, Diana exists for us as primarily a visul presence.

The beautiful boy. The stunning childhood color photographs in
Morton's book, lavishly reproduced with the care normally reserved
for old-master paintings, reveal an element in Diana we may have
been only subliminally aware of: her boyish androgyny. With her
refined Greek profile and ethereal expression, she looks remarkably
like the seraphic Antinous. Staring vacantly at the television in a
half-dozen different pictures, she has the eerie, blank, contemplative
"Attic look" of Athenian divinities.

Charisma springs from a presexual narcissism that is both male
and female. It is Diana's androgynous charisma that makes her so
photogenic; the camera is picking up her perfect, glowing, self-
enclosed childlikeness — not to be confused with childishness, a be-
havioral flaw. Morton's book provides startling new information to
explain this phenomenon: "I Was Supposed To Be a Boy," reads
one chapter title. A badly deformed male baby was born to the
Spencers, after two healthy girls, and soon died. Diana, the third
girl, born a year and a half later, disappointed everyone's expec-
tations. The fifth child was the long-awaited male heir, christened
with great fanfare in Westminster Abbey, with the Queen as god-
parent. Brought up with her brother in a divorced home, with her
two older sisters soon off to boarding school, Diana seems to have
merged with him in gender: standing in the photos next to his ath-
letic, long-legged sister, he seems plump, girlish, and abashed.

Very beautiful people have an autoerotic quality plainly visible
in the Diana pictures, which border on kiddie porn. The young
Diana, in boots and creased, crotch-tight overalls, leans back against
a fence rail in an attitude of solicitation normally associated with
boy prostitutes. We see a good deal of the ample developing bosom
and a great array of peekaboo shots in towels and bathrobes, in-
cluding one in a Paris hotel bed. Aquatics offer all the charms of
semi-nudity, and so we repeatedly watch Diana diving or posing,

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with the precise leg position of Botticelli's Venus, at poolside. There
has been a persistent, half-conscious provocativeness in Diana's big
public moments. In her first candid photo session at the London
kindergarten where she worked, the newly engaged Diana was
caught against sunlight in a see-through skirt that revealed her wil-
lowy legs. For her first oflicial appearance with Charles, she chose
a strapless, low-cut, lushly bust-revealing black ballgown that en-
amored the world but — we now learn — surprised and annoyed
Charles.

One of the principal, much-debated issues relating to the cult
of Greek youth was paideia, or education. Child-rearing emerges as
a major theme in Morton's book. Diana was raised with the "for-
mality and restraint" typical of British upper-class families. Her
brother never had a meal with his father until he was seven. The
kind of constant parent-child contact that is the norm, for better or
worse, in poorer, smaller homes was missing from both Diana's and
Charles's upbringing. Nannies, ranging "from the sweet to the sa-
distic," as Morton puts it, are the parent substitutes. One nanny
punished the Spencer girls by mixing laxatives in their food; another
beat Diana on the head with a wooden spoon. The children retaliated
by putting pins on the nannies' chairs or throwing their clothes out
the window. Privileged British children are soon packed off to board-
ing school, in an enforced separation from their homes that would
be considered cruel and traumatic in contemporary America. Diana
is determined to treat her sons differently: "I hug my children to
death and get into bed with them at night." Is this enlightened or
suffocating?

The book's striking dust-jacket photos illustrate Diana's duality.
On the front, she kneels in a fountain of white chiffon. She is wearing
what looks like a stripped-down wedding dress from which every
adornment has been torn, after battle on the field of love. The bodice
is daringly ofT-thc-shouldcr, in her usual unsettling subtext of sen-
suality. On the back, in her androgynous mode, Diana wears a
bohemian black turtlcneck and pants. With her tousled hair, she
looks like the Beatles on their first album cover. This reminds us
that, with the failure of the Wales' marriage, the popular imagination
has suffered its bleakest awakening since the Beatles broke up.

Diana's multiple personae, from princess and mother to Greek

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171

ephebe, are rich and far-ranging but also mutually contradictory,
and they are clearly consuming her. No one, least of all a nervous,
vulnerable young woman, could sustain the voyeuristic laser beam
of the world's adulation. Deification has its costs. The modern mega-
celebrity, bearing the burden of collective symbolism, projection,
and fantasy, is a ritual victim, cannibalized by our pity and fear.
Those at the apex of the social pyramid are untouchables, con-
demned to horrifying solitude. There may have been many unhappy
wives in royal history, but they did not have to live their emotions
under the minute scrutiny of the telephoto lens. Mass media have
made both myth and disaster out of Diana's story. We have created
her in our own image. And, pursued by our best wishes, Diana the
huntress is now the hind paralyzed in the world's gun sight.

TELEVISION AND THE CLINTONS

Television is America's kingmaker. The election of Bill Clinton
to the presidency has finally demonstrated that television is not the
crude, vulgar destroyer of political intelligence that so many com-
mentators have claimed over the past twenty years.

The television eye does not lie. Ads can be manipulated, but
the live camera, following candidates around the clock through the
long, bruising primary and campaign seasons, lets the public scru-
tinize the field up close and personal. Jostled, harassed, and dog-
tired, candidates eventually reveal their true nature, in all its quirks
and strengths.

Policy alone is no way to pick a modern president. In the nine-
teenth century, before America was a world power, exhaustive three-
hour debates of the Lincoln-Douglas kind may have been indis-
pensable for proving fitness for office. But in today's intricate web
of global telecommunications, unpredictable hair-trigger crises in
remote, unstable places are a constant reality.

George Bush was right: character is the ultimate criterion for
measuring political candidates. The man or woman who would be

[San Francisco Examiner, November 15, 1992]

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

1 "73

president must have energy, stamina, good instincts, and steady
nerves. Like an admiral or general under fire, the president must
make snap judgments about confused, mercurial situations where
information is scanty and the lives of thousands hang in the balance.

Clinton's positions on civil rights, the environment, and the
economy were not enough to elect him if he failed the character
test. Questions about his honesty and integrity hovered over him
throughout the campaign. Zigging and zagging, he never gave
fully satisfactory answers about his military draft history or alleged
extramarital affairs. But popular support solidified enough to win
him the White House. How and why?

The 1992 election was one of television's finest hours. Press
reports have overstressed the unique television candidacy of inde-
pendent Ross Perot, who used his billions to buy airtime in the
canned style of late-night kitchen-gadget commercials. Television
gave Perot national exposure, but it also undid him. Charmed at
first by his brusque business sense and tart Texas talk, many people
became disturbed by Perot's erratic glibness and mythomania, of
which his bloody, elaborate, but totally uncorroborated dog-bites-
terrorist-buttocks tale was the most grotesque example.

Television at first seemed to sink Clinton. His performance on
60 Minutes — when he and Hillary evaded Steve Kroft's questions
about Gennifer Flowers's claims of a long affair with Clinton — was
weak. He was sheepish, ill-at-ease, abashed, like a schoolboy caught
with his hand in the cookie jar. His wife was stronger, more resolute,
mixing offense and defense with defiant bursts of vinegar and pepper.
Hillary seemed fascinating and talented, but did one want to promote
to commander-in-chief a man who came across as an overgrown
mouse on his wife's leash?

60 Minutes was the valley of political death out of which Clinton
climbed by his own persistence and effort. Week by week, he slogged
along through the primaries, facing down snickering, insults, and
slander. He seemed tireless. The exhausted press corps called him
"Robo-candidate." This was Clinton's punishing rite of passage.

As the nation watched on television, bags sagged under his eyes,
and his voice grew raspy. His goofy, overconciliatory manner dis-
appeared. His temper flared. The moment in New York when he
fiercely snapped back at a gay heckler was pivotal. Battleworn and

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peevish, the boyish Clinton found the stern masculine persona with-
out which no one — male or female — can lead a nation.

Retaining his buoyancy and composure through adversity, Clin-
ton grittily proved his character on television. It was also how he
defeated a sitting president. By sheer brute physical vigor and en-
durance, Clinton forced a changing of the guard, a supplanting of
one generation by the next. The fall of the elders before a young
challenger is always a cruel moment in mythology or in wolf packs.

Throughout the campaign, Bush was vague, fumbling, fatigued.
He who had finally emerged from Ronald Reagan's paternal shadow
only four years ago now seemed antiquated, dispensable. Bush's
waning was ironically intensified by the unexpected waxing of Dan
Quayle, who in the twilight of the Republican dynasty suddenly
gained a sharp combative voice and persona after his long purga-
tory of scathing mockery by comedians and pundits. Quayle's self-
propulsion out of eclipse was also made possible by television.

The baby-boom generation has come to power in both parties
with a surge of primal energy. Clinton has ignited the hopes and
passions of the students of the Nineties in exactly the way John F.
Kennedy did for us in the Sixties. I remember the breathless exhil-
aration I felt as a thirteen-year-old campaigning for Kennedy in
1960. The doldrums of the Eisenhower years were over. The whole
future opened giddily before us.

The exuberant energy of the Clintons and Gores connects us
again to what was best about the Sixties generation, which later
defeated itself in so many ways. On the podium at the Democratic
convention, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore held hands and jumped
up and down in a victory dance of infectious glee. On stage at the
governor's mansion in Little Rock on election night, Al Gore, kneel-
ing and wildly shaking hands, had to be yanked back by the belt as
he nearly toppled into the crowd.

Spontaneity, humor, fun: the Sixties, older and wiser, have re-
turned. It's hard to imagine Nancy Reagan breaking into a jig to
Fleetwood Mac. Sixties women are not afraid to break the rules or
offend decorum. The Clintons as a shrewd power couple have forged
a broad national coalition by breaking the sterile deadlock of liberal
versus conservative that has paralyzed political thought for twenty-
five years. They have taken the best from left and right to make a

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promising new synthesis that combines the moral quest for social
justice with a respect for history and tradition, the virtues of the
heartland.

But what happens next? To govern, one must command the
stubborn machinery of Washington, which outlasts all presidencies
and parties. One must prioritize, husband resources, quell the turf
wars of subordinates and special interests, and keep the ravenous
media at bay. And around the world a hundred sectarian pots
threaten to boil over. If the new administration can find the right
combination of courage, toughness, and patience, the Sixties will
have truly matured.

KIND OF A BITCH:
WHY I LIKE HILLARY CLINTON

Many of us voted for the Clintons as a power couple. They
complement each other, and neither is totally adequate as a leader
alone. That, I think, is what is so new. They are a symbol of the
new kind of feminism: woman as co-equal to man, and sharer of
responsibilities. When conservatives maligned Hillary before the
election as "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock," the feminist estab-
lishment tried to claim that this was the sort of vulgar, derogatory
talk always used by the patriarchy to cut down ambitious and com-
petent women. I saw that the charge had some truth in it. I like
Hillary because she's kind of a bitch. She has a quick, sharp tongue —
which she managed to conceal for most of the campaign but which
comes out periodically.

But what won Clinton the presidency — his buoyancy and his
common touch — are things that Hillary Clinton lacks. I've been a
public fan of Hillary's right from the start, but there has been wild
overpraise of her by the feminist establishment, which has seriously
overestimated her capabilities.

Normally in power couples, it's the man who is cold and realistic

[An interview with Rebecca Mead, cover story, Sunday Times magazine,
London, April 18, 1993. Original title.]

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

1 77

and the wife who has feeling for children and likes to press the flesh.
It's the opposite with the Clintons, a sexual reversal: he's the one
who gets teary-eyed and is a sentimentalist, who is a sucker for
ceremonial occasions and for kissing babies. She has much more of
a legalistic and highly organized way of thinking. She has the more
traditionally masculine mind, he has the softer heart.

There's something feminine about Clinton's sexual persona.
He's the eternal boy, eternally optimistic, and that is extremely useful
on the world stage. The boyishness of a leader is a gift, a charismatic
quality. In Sexual Personae I concluded that true charisma is andro-
gynous and that many important leaders have a subliminal andro-
gyny appealing to and unifying the social classes. I think that Hillary
Clinton acting as Lady Macbeth behind the scenes allows her hus-
band to show his boyish side.

But such youthfulness can be extremely dangerous. It's a dif-
ficult problem when a leader's machismo is under challenge, as it
is now with the controversy over gays in the military. Unlike most
presidents, Clinton never served in the armed forces and was under
a shadow during the campaign because of his alleged draft-dodging
during the Vietnam war. Clinton needed to establish his authority
immediately after his inauguration, and this is where Hillary com-
plicated matters. We want a co-equal wife, and a woman who has
her own career. But we cannot have a situation where the president
is a wimp and his wife is a virago, an Amazon or Omphale figure.

Looking at it mythologically, I see a real danger of Hillary
turning into the Omphale archetype, the woman who enslaved Her-
cules, the most virile man of antiquity. Omphale put Hercules into
women's clothes and made him spin and do woman's work in her
household. Hillary is an enormously powerful woman. We don't
want the perception, or misperception, that she's controlling politics
from the boudoir, from behind the throne. Otherwise he turns into
a puppet dangling from the strings of a dominatrix.

To me there's a big question mark about what is going on
sexually in that marriage. I have the feeling that the Clintons' pub-
licly admitted marital problems came from Hillary's relapses into
her hyper law-student mode, intense and bookish, which shuts off
sexuality like a faucet. I wonder whether she has a problem — more
common among women than is realized — of integrating sexuality

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with high intelligence and careerism. Pictures of Hillary in law school
and her early career show that she was completely dowdy. This is
also something I went through. In the 1970s I vowed I would never
wear a dress again because it was a badge of servitude. I was de-
termined to sabotage my own sexual persona, and that's what I
think Hillary did too.

Hillary can be sexy, but it was amazing how, on inauguration
day, there was an uncomfortable return to her dowdy persona. She
had this dreadfully frumpy scarf pulled up to her chin and a stiff
hat jammed down to her eyes, and she just looked stumpy and
dumpy. It was a reversion under high stress to dowdiness, and I
think we were seeing her truest, deepest nature.

The problems of the Clinton household are mirroring those of
an entire generation. It seems to me that the Clintons represent the
best of the Sixties generation, and the worst too. We had so many
hopes and ideals, but we hit the wall of reality. Decade by decade,
we of the Sixties have been forced to acknowledge that life is more
complex and baffling than we thought. I am very uneasy when
feminists and journalists overpraise Hillary and hail her as the su-
preme feminist woman, the supremely gifted one who will soon be
running for president herself.

The toll taken on the Clintons' daughter Chelsea by their power-
couple marriage seems to be obvious. The girl looks like an orphan.
She looks abandoned, as if she's a castaway on a desert island, a
hostage in the family. During the entire campaign she was kept from
sight. There was all this pious talk from people that the Clintons
were nobly shielding their child from the pressure of public scrutiny.
The first time we got a look at Chelsea, just before the Democratic
convention, it was a terrible shock. One felt she was a walking,
talking demonstration of the internal problems of her parents' mar-
riage. At the convention, Hillary was all turned out and stylish, but
Chelsea seemed to be deliberately trying to upstage her mother by
looking like a spinster in mourning. Her rebellion against her parents
was painful to see; it sabotaged the public displays and protestations
of family happiness. I think there's a combat going on between
mother and daughter, even a kind of terrorism.

I'm not saying that Hillary should have stayed home with Chel-
sea. Feminism must move forward, and women must get what they

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1 79

can from both the career realm and from motherhood. But we must
get over this naive optimism that everything will be just dandy, that
you can succeed gloriously as both a mother and a professional
without taking from either. Many of Hillary's problems came from
this terrible dilemma facing modern women. The feminist estab-
lishment in America constantly insists that you can have it all. But
I agree with Katharine Hepburn that you can't; something or some-
one will suffer.

Hillary's strength during the campaign was her shrewd ability
to mask herself in a bland, centered, middlebrow American persona
that was a kind of throwback to the 1950s. She consistently looked
quite good. She was able to communicate to American women that
she is someone who sympathizes and empathizes with the role of
wife and mother and yet holds her own beliefs and is in no way
under the male thumb. She seemed to be both an independent
thinker and a conventional woman grounded in the family.

There was a pivotal moment in the campaign when Hillary said,
in response to a nasty question about being a working mother: "Well,
listen, I could have stayed home and baked cookies." Many people
in America, especially women, did not like that at all. There was
an outcry, and the campaign could have been lost at that moment.
My admiration for Hillary Clinton is that she knew immediately
that she had made a misstep and she deftly adjusted. You never
heard that voice of hers again. People said: "Isn't that wrong, for
her to retreat in the face of social convention?" I said no, no, no,
on the contrary: this was a sign of Hillary's insight and political
astuteness. She knew the progressive issues that she and her husband
stood for — racial harmony, women's rights, toleration of gays —
would benefit more from her husband's election than from her being
able to be fully herself and do her own thing. She sacrificed her own
self-expression for a great good. The reality principle triumphed.

At the peak of her campaign mode, Hillary was tapping into
the power of the Southern woman, which she had learned after many
years as the governor's wife in Arkansas. Southern women can be
both earthy and glamourous. They are superb hostesses: they know
how to flirt wittily with men. Down South the women are very potent.
There's a way they can command men that Hillary learned when
she arrived there from the North.

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Over time, she became a Southern blonde, which I have learned
to admire as a great sexual persona. Hers was a sober version of the
Southern belle; there's no doubt that Hillary got a lilting cadence
to her voice and a confident smile on her face from her experiences
in Arkansas. Now, of course, she's in Washington, where people
don't act like that, and she seems unfortunately to have lost the
persona, since the models for it aren't around every day.

Part of the problem is that she's doing the circuit as head of the
president's task force on health care, asking questions, amassing
information, and so forth, and it's increasingly difficult for her to
retain that light, warm, feminine manner that she sustained so suc-
cessfully during the campaign. Now that she's deeply immersed in
hard practical issues, the TV cameras catch that cool, disciplined
personality that was hiding under the gracious Southern persona.
Now we see the eager, earnest, conscientious law student coming
out again. She's been forced into the public eye in her most limited,
most cerebral persona. Meanwhile Clinton is floundering with the
gays-in-the-military issue, which he mishandled from the start. Right
now, as sexual personae, the Clintons are a disaster.

Hillary must very quickly recover that successful warm, calm
persona she had throughout the campaign. The country cannot feel
confident about leaders who look as if they're anxiously cramming
for an exam.

I think there is a problem that the feminist establishment refuses
to face: career women in the Anglo-Saxon world have desexed them-
selves. Latin countries still acknowledge and celebrate the sexual
power of woman. There is a mystique about it which we do not
have. Unfortunately, when women achieve high positions in Britain
and America, it seems to be at the price of their sexuality. There is
a bleached, sanitized, desexed, desensualized quality to Hillary's
persona, even at her sexiest. In other words, Hillary Clinton shows
all of the possibilities of the modern career woman, but also all of
the dangers: at the executive level of the industrialized world, we
may be cutting ourselves off at the neck. Our battle is not just with
the male establishment but with ourselves: how do we keep mind
and body together?

HILLARY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

From Crossfire, CAW, March 8, 1994. Hosts: Michael Kinsley and Pat
Buchanan. Guests: Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis in Washington and
Camille Paglia in New York. On Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal.

KINSLEY: We're going to get into that shredding in a little bit, but
let me ask Camille Paglia. I don't know about you, but I en-
counter extraordinary antagonism towards Hillary Clinton, far
beyond anything that could be explained by Whitewater or
health care or anything like that, and I do think, it seems to
me, that a lot of it at least is old-fashioned resentment of a
successful, powerful woman. Now, isn't that fair?

PAGLIA: I don't agree with this, because I'm a Clinton Democrat.
I loved Hillary during the campaign. I wrote articles about her.
One appeared in England, a cover story, and so on, but I have
been bitterly disappointed in her performance ever since they
took office. I'm judging her not as a woman but as a person in
the public life. I feel that she has no idea how to maintain herself
in that high position. She just hides from accountability. I find
her arrogant. I find her cold. I think that there was too much
unctuous genuflection in front of her, that the liberal media had
only one image of her for the last year, and they're starting to

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wake up to reality, seeing her in action here. I think she has
fumbled and bumbled and shown a kind of lack of character.
The first moment when I began to have a chill about her was
inauguration gala night, when Clinton sat there enjoying him-
self, very effusive, very open, and she sat there with this like
pursed expression on her face, very tight. I felt that they were
a power couple, a great power couple. They made many, many
serious mistakes. One of the first things they did wrong was to
separate the two of them within days. I mean, the way she was
suddenly unleashed within days of taking office. Their people
should have allowed the country to get to know her for a few
months. To put her in charge of health care — one of the most
important issues facing the nation, a very complex matter — so
early on, she began to look like a kind of worried student. She
was always frowning —

KINSLEY: Now, Camille, if a man, say Pat Buchanan, to pick a man
at random, had said that he was against Hillary Clinton because
he didn't like the way she pursed her lips at the inauguration
ball, he'd be savaged for sexism.

PAGLIA: As a woman and as a feminist, I can state that I am not
critiquing her as a woman. I'm critiquing her as a person in the
public eye. . . . What I'm saying is that week after week, month
after month, her old reputation, coming from the far right, of
being the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock, has proved to be true ! . . .
There is something manipulative, cold, and self-withholding
about her that it has taken the liberal media a year to realize,
and they —

lewis: Wait a minute —

BUCHANAN: All right. Let's get Ann Lewis back into this.

LEWIS: If we're going to talk about Hillary Clinton as a person,
can't we just stop and look at the year she's had? I'm stunned
to hear this kind of language being thrown around. Here is a
woman who one year ago relocated her family, including a teen-
age daughter, and those of us with teenage children know that
isn't ever easy to do, changed her job, left friends and her sort
of support network behind —

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES 183

PAGLIA: Oh, give me a break!
LEWIS: — moved to a strange city —
PAGLIA: Oh, what a sob story.
KINSLEY: Hold on, Camille.
PAGLIA: Oh, the violins, the violins!
LEWIS: I am going to finish my talking —
PAGLIA: What a sob story.

LEWIS: — moves to a strange city, her father dies —
PAGLIA: Oh, her father dies.
LEWIS: — her friends are under attack —
PAGLIA: Oh, please.

LEWIS: This has been personally very difficult —
BUCHANAN: Ann Lewis —

LEWIS: — and to see her now criticized for what somebody remembers
as an expression on her face —

BUCHANAN: Ann, excuse me —

LEWIS: — seems to me so grossly unfair, it's appalling.
PAGLIA: That is absurd — ridiculous*
BUCHANAN: Camille, can I get into this?

PAGLIA: They want special standards for womenl That's what you're
asking!

LEWIS: Camille, I'm asking for common standards of decency and
human dignity.

paglia: Decency?

LEWIS: I would extend it to anyone here on this stage —
PAGLIA: She's in the public eye.

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LEWIS: — and that includes people who are in the public eye, because
when you go into the public eye, you do not lose your humanity
or your warmth —

BUCHANAN: Camille, I'm going to get in here.

PAGLIA: Oh, I've never heard such sentimentality — ! Saccharine,
saccharine sentimentality.

BUCHANAN: Excuse me, Camille. Ann Lewis, aren't you asking for
something of a double standard here?

paglia: Yes.

BUCHANAN: First you want her to be the super cabinet officer. She's
got control of health care and all the rest of it. Along comes
Whitewater-gate, she can't have a press conference. It's like,
look, we want to go out and play with the boys, play touch
football, they get knocked down, and you're crying and talking
about how tough it was to relocate her family.

PAGLIA: Right. . . .

KINSLEY: Camille, isn't it a little tough on someone like Hillary
Clinton to be accused essentially of being a false feminist because
she really got her job through her spouse? What else can the
spouse of the president do, even if it's a man? Can't really have
a career of his own, can he?

PAGLIA: Even the way she handled the health-care thing I did not
approve of. I felt that her performance on the Hill — she was
always one step away, I felt, from saying, ' 'You know, I'm smarter
than you." There's something about her —

KINSLEY: You know, people say the same thing about you, Camille.

PAGLIA: I am not in public office! I am outside the political estab-
lishment —

KINSLEY: So I don't understand what your objection is. Your ob-
jection is that people of the public establishment shouldn't imply
that they're smarter than other people but that you can?

PAGLIA: No, no, no. I feel there's a kind of secretiveness about her,
even the way they handled the health-care thing. I have not been

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1 85

impressed with her performance over the last year, and it's taken
people a long time to catch up with it.

KINSLEY: What are you talking about, secretiveness on health care?
They produced a thirteen-hundred-page report. They're in trou-
ble because it's so detailed.

PAGLIA: No, it was never clear how many people were involved in
the whole procedure, who they were —

KINSLEY: Oh, Camille, who on earth cares about that? The fact is,
Hillary put together, with the help of her task force, a thirteen-
hundred-page plan which is now getting in trouble precisely
because it's so detailed, whereas the rival plans are not.

PAGLIA: I'm sorry, no, no. They dug a hole for themselves, because
when they started out, I was behind the Clintons — the idea of
universal coverage and so on. As the year has gone on, I have
systematically lost confidence in her and in him. I no longer believe
anything they say. I believe nothing that comes out of that White
House. They have a terrible staff. George Stephanopoulos is a
complete incompetent. I don't know why he wasn't kicked out
of there ages ago. . . .

KINSLEY: Camille Paglia, you told something to our staff that I just
want to check out whether you really meant it. You criticized
Hillary Clinton for taking sixteen days off from the health care
task force to be by the bedside of her dying father, who did
subsequently die. Gosh, at the end of a long life, sixteen days
with your father is — What was wrong with it?

PAGLIA: She had just been put in charge of this enormously complex
thing of health care, okay? Either we have to judge her as a
person or judge her as a public official. If you're going to give
yourself over to the public trust, there are certain private things
you must sacrifice. I feel that in this age of jet planes it was
absolutely ridiculous. I mean, to me that was not impressive. I
do not feel this was a great demonstration of her filial feeling.
On the contrary, I think she was getting out of Washington is
what she was doing, and it was the same motif she's doing now:

186 VAMPS & TRAMPS

hide, don't deal with the reality, don't learn! She's out of her
depth.

KINSLEY: What was she trying to duck? Her popularity was terrific
back then. She had no reason to want to get out of Washington.
I mean, you're really attributing cynical motives to going to be
by her dying father?

paglia: Yes, I am.

KINSLEY: You wouldn't want a man or a woman to do the same
thing?

PAGLIA: No, neither a man — which means the same standard.
KINSLEY: I agree with you.

PAGLIA: If you saw a man sitting by the bedside of his father for
sixteen days, you would think there were possibly other motives
involved.

KINSLEY: Maybe you would think that. . . .

LEWIS: And by the way, nobody has said that the brilliance of the
White House in handling this — let's be clear, that's right. This
is Whitewater, an issue around which there is no serious alle-
gation of wrongdoing. Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1978 —

BUCHANAN: No serious —

paglia: Oh, God!

LEWIS: No serious allegation. When you take out a loan from a
commercial bank, not a savings and loan, they pay commercial
rates —

BUCHANAN: You don't think that rate —

LEWIS: They paid it all back, and all of a sudden, we're talking
about it as if it were a big scandal.

BUCHANAN: I'll tell you what —

KINSLEY: Let me ask you —

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1 87

PAGLIA: There was a suicidel There was a suicide in the White House,
for heaven's sakes. I mean, what are they talking about? God!

KINSLEY: Gamille, there was no suicide in the White House. The
suicide had nothing to do with Whitewater —

PAGLIA: Oh, I don't believe that — oh, pleasel

KINSLEY: You don't believe that either?

PAGLIA: I don't believe that for one minutel ... I came back from
England in early January, and outside of America people see
Hillary Clinton much more clearly than they do here, okay? That
is, there's this kind of a sanctimony about her in the press for the
last year. I really think that there is something sexist about all
of the horror of us — of anyone — criticizing Hillary. People are
acting as if we're contaminating the Madonna by daring to —

KINSLEY: Who's horrified? She's been taking a beating for the past
week. I don't see anyone saying it's inappropriate. They say it's
inaccurate, but they're not saying it's inappropriate.

PAGLIA: There's been a year, okay, of this lily-white reputation of
her, wild overpraise, even of her performance on the Hill. People
have been afraid to be called sexist and so on. So inside the
Beltway, everybody's very accustomed to thinking of her as a
kind of — you know, as Saint Hillary. . . . This is a woman who's
out of her depth, a person who's out of her depth in the present
position that she has.

LAYING THE GHOST
OF ANITA HILL!
BILL CLINTON AND PAULA JONES

From Larry King Live, CAW Television, May 16, 1994. Host: Larry King.
Guests with King in the studio in Washington, D.C.: Eleanor Smeal, president
of the Feminist Majority Foundation and former president of NOW; Katie
Mahoney, head of Christian Defense Coalition's Paula Jones Legal Defense
Fund. In Philadelphia: Camille Paglia, identified on-screen as "feminist com-
mentator. 33

[King questions Smeal about the reluctance of feminist groups to support former
state of Arkansas clerical worker Paula Jones in her charge of sexual harassment
against then- Governor and now-President Bill Clinton.]

LARRY KING: Camille, would you talk to Paula Jones?

PAGLIA: I sure would! I find her story pretty credible — in fact, much
more credible than Anita Hill's. I am delighted. I must say,
first of all, I'm a Clinton Democrat. I support ninety percent
of Bill Clinton's policies. I hope to vote for him again. But I am
the only leading feminist who went against Anita Hill, and boy,
I am so glad that you see NOW squirming on the hot seat, okay?
They are such hypocrites. Finally, they are being exposed to the
nation for the partisans that they really are!

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1 89

SMEAL: We're not squirming at all. We're just not going to be
baited —

PAGLIA (with relish): Oh, you're squirmingi . . .
KING: Why do you seem to enjoy this?

PAGLIA: I am so happy that finally the Stalinist, p.c. feminist es-
tablishment is exposed for what it is. Instead of blaming David
Brock [author of The Real Anita Hill] and the American Spectator
[a conservative magazine], it's the media that was totally biased,
that should have pursued these issues. They were so eager to
get rid of Bush, they never pursued these issues in Little Rock.
So now the chickens have come home to roost. This case is not
just about Anita Hill. What about the [Mike] Tyson case? —
where Tyson was railroaded — a similar case, where someone in-
vited a woman up to his hotel room —

KING: Camille, you are a feminist?

PAGLIA: I am a committed feminist. I am a dissident feminist (angrily
stabs her finger at the camera). And NOW does not speak for Amer-
ican women! NOW does not speak for all women or all fem-
inists! . . .

KING: Camille, you are a Clinton supporter — a vibrant Clinton
supporter?

PAGLIA: I am. In Europe, you see, the private lives of politicians
are of no concern to their public behavior. I believe in moderate
sexual harassment guidelines. If he was indeed her boss ulti-
mately, as the governor of Arkansas, I think there might be a
sexual harassment issue there. But just a man hitting on a
woman and trying to have sex with women? I think we're a very
puritanical country. I'm for a high libido president! I applaud
him, if he goes out and picks up women. . . .

SMEAL [about the Jones case]: I think it's a put-up job by the right
wing. . . .

PAGLIA: Oh, come on\ The Anita Hill case was a put-up job by the
feminist establishment. Why has the media and why have lib-

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erals ceded over to the right the power of critique? Don't blame
the people who are pushing Paula Jones forward. She needs all
the support she can get. Her charges arc far more serious than
those of Anita Hill. . . . [King asks about the allegations of
sexual harassment against Senator Bob Packwood.] I like the
way the feminist establishment used Packwood until the election
of Clinton, then they threw him to the wolvesl What is this, the
Soviet Union? If Packwood is accused, bring the women forward.
Bring the accusers forward! Let's examine them in public.

SMEAL: They want to come forward. They've been demanding a
hearing —

PAGLIA {scornfully): Nonsense! Oh, you people manipulate the
news —

SMEAL: You're always attacking us — you're making a cottage in-
dustry out of it. That's all you're doing!

PAGLIA: Oh, you people are such Stalinists! You people are
dishonest — you are manipulative. We are sick of you, NOW —
sick of you, former leaders of NOW! We're tired of you! ... I
think most people in the country don't really care about Bill
Clinton's private life. What we do care about is honesty. So I
think that the White House should be much more up front and
stop this stonewalling. Because you can't believe a single word
that comes out of this White House. I'm behind Clinton's pol-
icies. I just think that he has very bad judgment about staff. A
lot of this is just staff ineptitude. If he would just 'fess up and
get on with it. He's not accused of anything that happened since
he swore the oath of office, and that would be the grounds of
impeachment. . . . Paula Jones should be given her day in court.
I don't think we should believe any allegations until the evidence
is put forward. Certainly that was not the case with Anita Hill!
I'm just hoping it does not derail the Clinton presidency. I think
the sexual peccadilloes of great men, of great politicians should
be overlooked. I know I'm kind of on the radical extreme with
that one.

MONA LISA IN MOTION!
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS

The death of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis on May 19
was headline news in America and inspired testimonials of love and
respect across all divisions of social class and political party. Jackie
was the most famous woman in the world in a long period following
that of the great stars of old Hollywood and preceding that of our
own pop princesses, Diana and Madonna, both currently in semi-
eclipse.

Merely as a paragon of high fashion and elegant good taste,
Jackie could not have won the position she retained over several
decades in millions of people's affection. It was her baptism by
gunfire that deified her. Her extraordinary behavior during and after
the assassination of her husband has given her a permanent place
in history. In the blood-spattered limousine in Dallas, an archetypal
pieta was forced on Jackie. Cradling the shattered head of the head
of state in her lap, she became Michelangelo's grieving Madonna,
caught between horror and admiration at the wounded body of her
beautiful son. The Catholic Andy Warhol paid tribute to this aspect

[The New Republic, June 13, 1994]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

of her in his Duccio-like checkerboard altarpiece of Jackie as national
mater dolorosa.

Jackie's heroism was made possible, I submit, by a neglected
element of her famous biography. Everyone knows about her ath-
leticism and cult of fitness, her love of horses from childhood. What
we are admiring in her deportment in crisis is dressage, the art of
English horsemanship, an aristocratic style that descends from the
prc-revolutionary ancien regime of the eighteenth century. When peo-
ple say Jackie is "the closest thing to royalty" American democracy
has ever seen, this is what they really mean.

Dressage is a form of radical minimalism, of hierarchical stillness
and repose. The rider's signals to the horse are completely invisible.
Jackie, masquerading as the perfect adornment, was a master of
manipulation and control, not of the psychological realm, where she
was at the mercy of adulterous men, but of the physical realm, which
she brought to the highest level of refinement. From her renovation
of the White House to John F. Kennedy's magnificent state funeral,
she simplified, condensed, and reshaped, out of her powerful instinct
for visual symbolism.

In ancient Greek culture, the image of horse and rider repre-
sented the victory of reason in the eternal battle of civilization with
anarchy. Horsemanship had a spiritual meaning as the discipline of
our animal impulses. As her parents' marriage disintegrated, the
very young Jacqueline Bouvier found in the public ritualism of riding
a life structure that served her well to the end. She became a cus-
todian of the forms — posting herself at Lyndon Johnson's side as he
swore the hurried oath of office on Air Force One, doggedly cele-
brating her son's third birthday party on the day of his father's
burial. The educative paradigm in equitation — the patient process
of "schooling" colts — was fulfilled in the success with which she
reared two unpretentious children who have escaped the whirlwind
of self-destructiveness that so often envelops the scions of celebrity.

Reflecting today on Jackie's stoical management of self and
surroundings in the aftermath of the assassination, we may rue the
disrespect with which my Romantic Sixties generation treated the
artifice of etiquette. It was tradition and ceremony — a severe for-
malism of lamentation as in Aeschylus's Libation Bearers — that reor-
dered the nation's blasted and scattered emotions after the shocking

MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

1 93

slaughter of its leader. As we fled the suffocating conformism of the
Fifties, our indifference to the positive aspects of convention even-
tually stranded us in the mawkish Great Wallow of victim culture.
"Let it all hang out," we said, for which we are now paying the
price. Jackie's classy grace under pressure, her cool rejection of
complaint or self-pity demonstrate the redemption possible in repres-
sion, sublimation, and silence.

As patron, connoisseur, and conservator of the arts, Jackie set
herself apart from the ordinary run of socialite women of the horsey
set, with their earnest, peppy, man-the-battle-stations bravado —
good examples are Princess Anne or Prince Charles's mistress, Cam-
illa Parker-Bowles — ironically, the style of the rambunctious Hyan-
nisport Kennedys, whose mania for touch football broke the ankle
of Jack's new bride. Balancing the contemplative with the active,
Jackie rediscovered the Greek ideal in horsemanship.

And the sport gave her superb reflexes. One of the absurd claims
in C. David Heymann's A Woman Called Jackie (1989) is that when
she scrambled up on the back of the limousine in Dallas, Jackie was
fleeing in terror for her life. Apollo preserve us from bookworm
biographers! Were Jackie seeking safety, the bred-in-her-bones,
crouching "forward seat" in jumping horses would automatically
have put her on the floor of the car. In lunging for a flying fragment
of her husband's skull, Jackie placed herself directly in the line of
fire, an act of great physical courage for which she has never been
honored.

As a diva who enamored the world paparazzi, Jackie had in-
teresting ambiguities. In Sexual Personae, commenting on her resem-
blance to perverse and perhaps hermaphroditic images in Aubrey
Beardsley, I cited a diary entry where Cecil Beaton records Jackie's
"suspicion of a mustache" and her "big boyish hands and feet"
(apparently size 10AA). Unlike her romantic rival Marilyn Monroe,
Jackie did not base her female power on an ample bosom. On the
contrary, her mannequin's silhouette was linear, in the classical
ballet style of Audrey Hepburn. A rigorous dieter, Jackie may have
been one step from anorexic, but we never noticed it, because of her
wide, serene moon face with its dreamy gaze and Mona Lisa smile.

In modern iconography, Jackie belongs to the Gene Tierney
category of brooding brunettes, mysterious and withdrawn. The

194 VAMPS & TRAMPS

voice is undeveloped and whispery, the eyes wide and frightened.
Such women often have a steely resolve or willfulness, all the more
daunting because of their evasion of open confrontation. The pas-
sionately intelligent Jacqueline Bisset, playing Jackie in The Greek
Tycoon (1978), never quite caught her unsettling ethereal quality, I
her misty clairvoyant aura. Jackie's influence as a trendsetter of
modern female personae can be seen in Anouk Aimee, Mary Tyler
Moore, Mario Thomas, Barbara Parkins, and Stefanie Powers. It
is a vibrant, mature heterosexual style, physically active and men-
tally alert, but without feminist stridency or anger. It is a still-
attractive model of attentiveness to men without subservience to
them.

Jackie's sophisticated stage presence and youthful joie de vivre
were exhilarating, after the Mamie Eisenhower decade of bourgeois
domesticity and chintz. Jackie was a transition toward a more as-
sertive and politically involved First Lady, the constitutional desir-
ability of whom we are still trying to assess. The dignity and restraint
of Jackie's later years made us forget or forgive her shopaholic jet-
set period, when she spun out of American orbit and married a
Mediterranean Minotaur.

What is indelible now is Jackie's fortitude and valor as a survivor
of the blood sport of male politics. Some strange law of retribution
cut down the wheeler-dealers in Dallas and spared the women at
their sides, as in a Greek tragedy like Euripides's The Trojan Women.
The stained suit Jackie refused to change that day documented the
polarities of womanhood: the pastel pink of girlhood and romance
and the barbaric blood red of birth and death. That garment, like
the Shroud of Turin, was a pictogram of her life story, with its failed
pregnancies and widowhood. This was a woman who thought in
universals: a rose garden, an eternal flame, a riderless horse, named
for her father, whose skittishness in the funeral parade expressed
uncontrolled male libido, the one beast Jackie never tamed.

MEMOIRS AND
ADVENTURES

1. The Saint. Brought from Italy by Felice and Vincenza Colapietro
Photo: Dean Gazzo.

THE SAINT

For fifty years, a large framed print of an Italian saint hung
over a bed in the house of my maternal grandmother, Vincenza
Colapietro, in Endicott, New York. The identity of the saint was a
mystery. A young man in his teens stands with hands piously clasped
and gazes down at an image of the Madonna, her heart pierced by
the daggers of the seven sorrows. He is wearing the cassock and
heavy, sinister black cloak of the Passionist monks. A misty silver
halo glows around his head. On the table next to Mary's picture is
a crucifix and, in grisly brown-gold, a gleaming human skull, resting
near a bouquet of lilies, symbolizing the Holy Mother's purity.

The saint's picture terrorized several generations of children,
beginning with my uncle Bruno, who had to sleep beneath it. When
his childhood bedroom eventually became the guest room, all my
overnight visits to my grandmother's ended with me being laid down
to sleep under the saint. As I usually stayed awake for hours, listening
to the raucous hilarity of Italian voices and savoring the heady smell
of strong coffee, whiskey, and anisette, I had a lot of time to stare
at the image above me.

At first, the picture looks like a poster for a horror film. The
blank walls and burnt sepia tones give it an aged, tomblike quality.
The saint's rapt devotion to Mary, is dreamy and hypnotic, both

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

obsessive and obsessing to a baffled child's eye. He is one of the
pretty boys who are everywhere in Italian art, notably in the creamy-
skinned, homoerotic Saint Sebastian and Saint Michael statues that
seemed to me, from my toddler's perspective in the church pew, far
more interesting than those of Jesus, Mary, or Joseph. My grand-
mothers saint locks eyes with the Madonna, typifying the intense
relations of mothers and sons in Mediterranean culture. As a monk,
he will not marry; like the priests of Cybele, he will remain the son-
lover of the goddess.

As the years passed, the saint's picture accumulated more and
more meaning. It became one of my personal icons, representing
not only the sacred omphalos-spot of my grandmother's house but
the essence of Italian Catholicism itself, which is both a religion and
the nation's cultural identity, descending from pagan antiquity. The
saint's quiet, cloistered contemplativeness symbolized for me the
beckoning life of the scholar, a vocation with monastic origins, par-
ticularly rich in my family's past because of the nearness of our
village of Ccccano to the great Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino,
founded in the sixth century.

My disaffection from American Catholicism, which began dur-
ing my adolescence in the late Fifties, was due partly to its strident
anti-sex rhetoric and partly to its increasing sclf-Protestantization
and suppression of its ethnic roots. Within twenty years, Catholic
churches looked like airline terminals — no statues, no stained-glass
windows, no shadows or mystery or grandeur. No Latin, no litanies,
no gorgeous jeweled garments, no candles — so that the ordinary
American church now smells like baby powder. Nothing is left to
appeal to the senses. The artistic education of the eye that I received
as a child in church is denied to today's young Catholics.

The polychrome images of tortured saints that are a staple of
Italian and Spanish Catholicism contain brutal truths about the
pagan realities of the body. Suburban American Catholicism, with
its soothing bourgeois banalities, has censored out all the horror and
ecstasy of human experience. The skull and lilies of my grandmoth-
er's picture arc a Catholic version of the Hindu cycle of birth and
death, which we Westerners think we can transcend. As Frazer
showed, the resurrection story, the triumph over death, originated
mythologically in ancient nature-cults of the dying god.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

1 99

Mediterranean culture is honest about death, which it does not
sentimentalize or conceal from children. The skull over the cradle:
Italian funerals feature open caskets and corpse-kissing, just as rural
Italian families rear their young with useful life lessons of rough
play. As a child, I learned to be wary about kisses from laughing
old widows, who would give one a sharp nip in the ear lobe for fun.
The first line of my autobiography would read: My people were
nursed by the she-wolf.

In 1986, having survived my grandfather Felice for twenty years,
my grandmother died at the age of ninety, and her house was sold.
I took as my heirlooms my grandfather's battered chisel, which
symbolizes for me the Italian love of labor and our genius for stone-
work and construction; a chipped carving knife, honed and danger-
ous as a scythe, souvenir of the kitchen, the center of domestic cult;
the rusted clothesline reel that hung behind the house for fifty years,
instrument of the old sun-blessed rituals of purification; and the
gloomy saint's picture — which, quite understandably, no one else
in the family wanted for a minute in his or her home. Intensely
coveted but inherited by default, the picture is one of my most
treasured possessions.

My grandmother never satisfactorily explained how our family
acquired the picture in the first place. We suspect it must have come
from a monastery high in the hills above Ceccano, on the road to
Castro di Volsci, whose name ("Camp of the Volscians") recalls
the region's fierce pre-Roman tribal history. As for the saint's iden-
tity, we assumed it was forever lost.

Five years after my grandmother's death, there was a burst of
publicity in American newspapers about an Italian saint whom a
Virginia man, an activist "defender of bearing arms," was nomi-
nating to be "the patron saint of handgunners." The saint, shown
in a black Passionist cape with its big white heart-and-cross emblem,
looked exactly like my grandmother's saint, now grown up. He was
Francis Possenti, called Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowing Mother, who
was born in 1838 in Assisi, died young of tuberculosis in 1862, and
was canonized in 1920.

All my life, I had seen in the picture a meek, mild-mannered
youth, studious, sensitive, and withdrawn. But astonishingly, the
real-life Francis Possenti had been quite different. A wild teenager

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

known for gambling, riding, and shooting, he decided to become a
priest, against his wealthy father's wishes, after a near-fatal illness.
While he was studying at the Passionist monastery at Isola, twenty
bandits attacked the town, plundering and torching it. Possenti,
armed with a pistol, faced down the marauders and demonstrated
his marksmanship by shooting a lizard through the head. The ban-
dits were shamed into surrendering their weapons. The town was
saved.

Whether one believes in God or not, the lives and legends of
the saints are a never-ending source of instruction and illumination.
Saint Gabriel, with his skull, his lilies, and his pistol, is my ideal
patron. The monks of the old country were a robust and fractious
lot, alternating daily between the spiritual and practical lives. Re-
ligious and intellectual conviction should never be genteel. We must
be ready to take to the streets to resist and expel the pillagers, even
when they are of the town. I offer the persona of the pistol-packing
monk to today's students, tomorrow's teachers.

MY BROTHERS IN CRIME!
BENDERSON, JARRATT, FELD,
FESSENDEN

Gay men have played a pivotal role in my personal and intel-
lectual development. They shaped my aesthetic, expanded my
world-view, sharpened my conversational style, and civilized my
tomboy rowdiness. Through them, I completed my break from
American Catholicism, under whose capricious rules I had been
seething since adolescence.

Women who consorted with gay men used to be called "fag
hags." The term was dismissively applied to a certain kind of hov-
ering, heterosexual mother figure, disappointed in love, who in-
dulged and coddled her charges and listened and worried without
blaming or shaming. That wasn't me. My rough manner and am-
biguities of gender and sexual orientation made me the comrade of
gay men, not their nurse. Together, we defied bourgeois convention
and moral law. Like the Romantics, we were brothers in crime.

Six gay men were central to my life. Robert Gaserio has been
my loyal friend, intimate confidant, and professional ally since grad-
uate school at Yale. Kent Christensen has been my colleague, ad-
visor, and consultant in all things cultural for the past ten years at
the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Both are lifelong political
liberals and, at the same time, gentlemen in the traditional sense:
courteous, cultivated, humanitarian.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

This essay is a portrait of the other four, whose sexual personae
broke the rules and whose refusals and rebellion belong to the public
record of my generation. Bruce Benderson, a childhood friend, in-
troduced me to Stephen Jarratt and Stephen Feld during my first
year (1964-65) at Harpur College, at the State University of New
York at Binghamton. The three became my coterie, the only group
I have ever happily flourished in. Their contributions to the creation
of the campy, semimythic diva and deranged gender-neutral entity,
"Camille Paglia," are immeasurable.

In 1972, the philosopher James Fessenden and I, both fresh out
of graduate school, met as young faculty members at Bennington
College. We immediately became constant companions. Like Caserio
and Christensen (and another of my Bennington friends, Richard
Tristman), Fessenden had attended Columbia University, whose
sweeping history-of-ideas curriculum seemed to produce minds pe-
culiarly sympathetic to my own. It was Fessenden with whom I was
in most sustained contact throughout the long process of writing
Sexual Personae. For twenty years, until his death from AIDS in 1992,
we were a festive, competitive symposium of two.

BRUCE BENDERSON

I met Bruce Benderson after my family moved to Syracuse in 1957,
when I was ten. My father, a high-school teacher in rural Oxford,
New York, had enrolled as a graduate student in Romance languages
at Syracuse University. We lived in graduate student housing, a
crowded complex of dilapidated army barracks spread on rolling
drumlin hills. Bruce's family situation was quite different. His father
was a prominent attorney; his mother, a Democratic activist, was
the most famous woman politician in upstate New York. The Bend-
ersons lived in Bradford Hills, as exclusive a residential area as I
had ever seen, though by today's lavish standards, their house was
relatively modest.

From the start, Bruce questioned the security and affluence of
his upbringing. He was the first of the contemporaries of my ac-
quaintance to "protest," to go against the grain, to put himself on
the line for a political ideal. The 1950s have been grossly sentimen-
talized by recent popular culture. Far from being the carefree

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

203

"Happy Days" of hamburg joints, convertibles, and sock hops, the
period could be a living hell for nonconformists and minorities like
blacks, Jews, or gays. As a nonathletic, intellectual Jewish boy, Bruce
suffered endless rejections and humiliations in a schoolyard world
that worshiped WASP good looks and social success, the values of
the fraternities, sororities, Protestant churches, and country clubs
that ruled Syracuse life.

Partly inspired by his Russian immigrant mother's liberalism,
Bruce identified with the underdog and all victims of tyranny. My
early encounters with him were not always pleasant. Bruce resented
and denounced my rude impatience with passive, clingy classmates,
whiny girls whom I reduced to tears. Later, he realized that, clumsy
and brutal as I was, I was reviving feminism in a period when it
was totally dormant. And I was to realize that Bruce's compassion
for the outsider and the loser belonged to his larger critique of
bourgeois society and political oppression. I also came to appreciate
Bruce's extraordinary intuitive understanding of the complex psy-
chology of the wounded, suffering, or masochistic woman — typified
by Marilyn Monroe, whom he took seriously long before anyone
else.

Bruce was the only visible beatnik on the cultural landscape in
junior and senior high school in Syracuse. He was the first person
who knew about Bob Dylan or read French avant-garde literature.
He was "arty" without being effete. Bruce is large, robust, tending
toward corpulence. His peasant vigor, so much like mine, still draws
us together. There was always a satirical zest to his esoteric interests.
For example, in high school he somehow got hold of a battered
department-store mannequin, which he christened "Nadja," after
Andre Breton's novel. This led to a long-running joke, which I
rehearse to this day with our friend Ann Jamison (whom Bruce, in
a desperate stab at normalcy, took to the senior prom for forty fiasco-
filled minutes). "Nadja!" we shout, "your bust has arrived and is
banging its boobs on the door!" Probably inspired by The Twilight Zone,
we had re-created the comic surrealism of Bunuel and Dali's Un
Chien andalou without having heard of it.

When Bruce and I ended up at the same college, we discovered
the full extent of our mutual intellectual and artistic interests and
forged a permanent bond, preserved, even when we have lived

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hundreds of miles apart, by long, intense phone calls at any time of
day or night. In thirty years, I have never had a conversation with
Bruce in which I did not learn something new. He is the most original
thinker I have ever known. Bruce has the aggressive verbal and
analytic style of the Talmudic tradition, combined with the hipster
slant of modern urban Bohemia. With his voracious appetites, hu-
morous lewdness, and polymorphous-perverse body language, he
reminds me of Allen Ginsberg, one of my heroes. His discourse, a
synthesis of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, parallels that of
another of my heroes, Norman O. Brown. But Bruce, consistent with
my generation's multimedia ambitions, has added film, pop culture,
and the visual arts to the mix.

Like me, and no one else we knew, Bruce was passionately
committed to becoming a writer from adolescence on. While I was
drawn to both scholarship and journalism (I was editor of our high
school newspaper), Bruce had no interest whatever in nonfiction, a
choice I continue to lament today, since I know his amazing aptitude
for cultural commentary. The short story and novel forms have been
Bruce's primary focus. In college his experiments in poetry were
disastrously terminated when an eminent creative writing teacher,
in a private office conference, expressed disgust at the homosexual
content of his work, a traumatic moment still painful to Bruce after
all these years. But at Harpur there was a literary ferment going on
outside the classroom. Our group was reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Mallarme, Lorca, and Genet, as well as contemporary American
poets.

After graduation, Bruce lived in New York during the period of
the Stonewall riots and then, with Stephen Jarratt and Stephen Feld,
moved to San Francisco, the capital of the counterculture. There he
began to read Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute as well as the
French poststructuralists, whom he absorbed and admired before
their usurpation and distortion by American academics. Bruce traces
his writing aesthetic to three influences: decadent French Roman-
ticism, from Baudelaire to Huysmans; the American Beat movement,
notably William Burroughs, John Rechy, and Hubert Selby, Jr.; and
the French nouveau roman of the Fifties and Sixties. Bruce has always
found in French culture greater intellectual freedom as well as a
Mediterranean pleasure principle missing from America, with its

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Puritan heritage. He visited France for long periods and ended up
translating or co-translating a series of French authors, including
Philippe Sollers and Pierre Guyotat. The Sollers translation was
done in collaboration with Ursule Molinaro, a French-born avant-
garde novelist who became Bruce's mentor and muse.

Despite every discouragement, Bruce pursued his writing in a
period when publishing became increasingly commercial. He burst
out irately to me, "I can't look at The New York Times Book Review
more than once every two years without going to New York Hospital
with a false heart attack!" When he left San Francisco for New York
in 1974, he chose to live on the Lower East Side, which was in a
shambles. As a writer, he felt a special rapport with heroin addicts,
the homeless, and the mentally ill, all of whom were invisible at the
time to American journalists and politicians. Visiting Bruce, I would
pick my way in horrified exasperation past the derelicts and the
garbage. It was many years before I fully understood what he was
doing by settling in that neighborhood and opening a dialogue with
the people of the street. He was determined to isolate and explode
the repressed assumptions of bourgeois culture, and in this enterprise
I he has been my most important guide. The insights of his rigorous
class-analysis were crucial in my guerrilla warfare against estab-
lishment feminism, which had made such a reactionary retreat from
Sixties values.

Despite the boldness with which he had asserted the right to
f homosexual love in college, Bruce did not feel comfortable with the
new gay activism that followed the Stonewall rebellion in 1969. He
found, to his discomfort, that he did not get along with many gay
men, and the feeling was mutual. He was bored by the middle-class
complacencies of the gay bar scene, disguised under unconvincing

I costumes of denim and leather. He loved drag queens, without being
attracted to them, and loathed the way post-Stonewall gays rejected
the queens and everything effeminate. Strong-willed straight women,
in the model of his celebrated mother, remained his principal con-
fidantes. He has always been comfortable with what he calls his
| "heterosexual component" and has slept with dozens of women,

I with sometimes complicated results. He speaks of the "lure and
excitement and power" that women have for him, even though his
overwhelming interest has been men.

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Brucc's love life began to center more and more on the dangerous
streets between Times Square and the Hudson River. He became a
regular at seedy bars frequented by tcenaged Puerto Rican hustlers,
most of whom are straight but who survive by selling their sexual
favors to men. He began to befriend ex-convicts and visit prisoners.
Our conversations would be interrupted by emergency collect calls
from inmates at Attica or Rikcrs Island. Like most of Brucc's friends,
I was highly apprehensive about all this and direly predicted he
would be robbed, injured, or worse. After several years, we stopped
nagging him, since he seemed remarkably sure-footed in that un-
stable underworld. There were incidents and imbroglios, but he
escaped serious harm. His discoveries were of the highest social
significance: for example, the radical differences of worldview be-
tween the industrial working class and the so-called underclass, the
"people of the rain forest," who, he said, "faced life and death issues
with cavalier machismo." And he had a materially positive effect
on several cherished hustlers. One in particular, who eventually left
the street life to obtain his high-school diploma, became like a son
to him. When Bruce took me to his favorite dive on 46th Street (the
evening ended in turmoil, as the bouncer ejected a gun-waving pa-
tron), we met a magically beautiful blonde transsexual nodding out
on heroin on a tottering bar stool and dreamily reminiscing about
the final hours of her "friend," Marilyn Monroe. We kissed and
caressed her soft hand in tribute.

Bruce's writing increasingly drew on his first-hand experiences
with male prostitutes, transvestites, convicts, and drug addicts. As
American culture changed, after the materialistic era of the Seventies
and Eighties, his work began to find a more receptive audience. By
the late Eighties, his stories were appearing in various arts magazines
and were eventually published as a collection, Pretending to Say No
(Plume Books, 1990). His second book is his first novel, User (Dutton,
1994). Bruce also cowrote the screenplay for My Father Is Coming
(1991) with the German director Monika Treut, a sexual freethinker
who was equally tired of gay and feminist orthodoxy. Meeting me
at Bruce's apartment, she was struck by my bizarre brand of comic
Amazonism and put me carrying on with Bruce in her next film,
Female Misbehavior (1992). Treut, who obtained her doctorate with
a scholarly study of sadomasochism, has become my most important

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ally in the international movement for a progressive pro-porn, anti-
dogma feminism.

After AIDS was identified and had claimed hundreds of lives
in New York and San Francisco, Bruce went through a period of
severe anxiety, in which the slightest symptom seemed a harbinger
of death. He was scrupulous about practicing safe sex with hustlers,
not so much to protect himself from them as vice versa. He applied
a ritualistic standard of cleanliness to his sexual encounters. In all
moral dilemmas or debates he explicitly invoked the standards of
"the ethical Jew," here above all. As the years passed, he showed
no signs of illness and remains healthy today. But I will never forget
a daffy exchange in 1 984 as I drove him from Manhattan to Syracuse
for our twentieth high-school reunion, the first time we had seen our
WASP sirens and tyrants since graduation. Somewhere between
Albany and Utica on the Thruway, I tried to distract him from his
obsessive examination of his dry skin patches and minutely swollen
armpit glands. Listening to the radio, I vaguely asked him, apropos
of nothing, "Did Pat Benatar have a nose job?" He peevishly shot
back, "Does she have a face? They don't operate on mice."

Bruce and I carry each other's complete biographies in our
mental data base. We have listened to and harangued each other
and mutually processed every item of our respective romantic od-
yssey and creative quest. I listen with exquisite attention to what
he says, since I have learned that wherever Bruce is, the culture will
be five years later. This was most striking in his fascination with
Japan in the early 1970s. He traveled to Tokyo, decorated his apart-
ment with kimonos and a massive shoji screen, and learned to pre-
pare sushi — a delicacy totally unknown to me that enamored me
for life. I remember sitting with glassy-eyed astonishment, staring
at the supple bamboo sushi molds, as Bruce exuberantly described
the critical step of fanning the hot rice — as if it were a fainting
Southern belle. Five years later, Japan, as a trade rival, had moved
massively into American consciousness.

An enormous part of my friendship with Bruce has been our
love of movies, in particular the "women's pictures" of the Holly-
wood studio period. We spend hours on the phone discussing Lana
Turner, Jane Wyman, Carroll Baker, Ann-Margret, or his specialty,
Joan Crawford, never a favorite of mine until I heard Bruce's bril-

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liant dissections of her mature sexual persona. We constantly ex-
change showbiz minutiae and arcana, a gay male expertise I have
never found, to my despair, in lesbians. For many years, Bruce
assisted his friend the Argentinean novelist Manuel Puig (in exile
in Rio de Janeiro) by systematically videotaping the most obscure
vintage B-movies that turned up on New York television in the
middle of the night. I love to command Bruce to recite whole pas-
sages of dialogue from our cult films, particularly those in female
voices, which he imitates with fiendish facility. With his raucous,
disruptive humor and gift for mimicry, he could easily have been a
radio disk jockey or stand-up comedian.

Our relationship has usually been one of warring siblings. As
we chat about people, art, or current events, each of us struggles for
interpretative dominance. When one is subsequently proved wrong,
the other never forgets it. We crow over victories, recite past tri-
umphs, and are generally insufferable. There has been an odd ethnic
cross-identification in us from the start. Bruce is fascinated by
Roman Catholicism and collects sacred memorabilia: hanging on
his wall is a large, doleful stone relief of one of the Stations of the
Cross, taken from a demolished church. I, in turn, was always drawn
to Judaism and, in junior high school, was curtly overruled by my
parents when I wanted to join the Jewish Community Center. My
mentors, such as Milton Kessler and Harold Bloom, have always
been Jews — the only people, I've joked, who can stand me. Bruce's
favorite saint, as I learned at grisly length, is Lydwine of Schiedam,
whose picturesque mortifications (fasting on a drop of wine per day
and counting her giant, worm-filled abscesses) were catalogued by
our revered French Decadent oblate, Huysmans.

Bruce and I are often at swordspoint on questions of morality,
which despite his bohemianism, he cannot fully renounce. He be-
lieves not in God or religion but in social justice, though, like me,
he detests the condescending paternalism of victim-oriented social-
welfare workers and bourgeois philanthropists. He is baffled by the
Italian clan mentality and its savage code of vengeance. The Greco-
Roman strain is very pronounced in me; I see the vendetta as jolly,
historical, knee-in-the-groin sport. But of course athletics is foreign
to Bruce ("I hate projectiles!" he booms). The same thing with cars:
I adore them; Bruce loathes them. He is a lover of cities, in all their

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209

grime and decay; his hatred of suburbia is due partly to its bland
sanitization and partly to its dependence on driving. He feels ago-
raphobic in vast parking lots. I, on the other hand, can breathe free
only in wide-open spaces under a big sky. And my car is my mas-
culine, mobile superself, transcending the here and now.

One of my principal bonds with gay men is our love of por-
nography, which we see as liberating and never, in the standard
feminist way, as degrading. The pro-sex feminists I have encountered
are rarely as raunchy and ribald as gay men in their taste for porn.
Bruce's lusty appreciation of the most extreme forms of pornography
was crucial as I developed my theory of the unity of art and por-
nography for Sexual Personae. The libidinal is Bruce's great ideal. He
despises all ideology that kills libido — in gay activism, feminism, or
organized religion. The ultimate Sixties principle in his philoso-
phy of life is his Romantic view of the interpenetration of energy
and eroticism.

STEPHEN LEON JARRATT

If Bruce Benderson, with his excesses and assertions, is a Baroque
personality on the grand scale, Stephen Jarratt is a cool mathe-
matical grid of abstract minimalism. The contrast between these
two friends could not be more marked. Bruce would devour an entire
package of chocolate Oreo cookies at a sitting, while Jarratt (as we
called him, to distinguish him from Stephen Feld) nourished himself
through his job at the college snack bar by consuming pickle chips
and soda water all day. Bruce physically resembles stout, mischie-
vous Bacchus figures like Federico Fellini or Zero Mostel, while
Jarratt, with his tall, slim frame, dusky skin, handsome, craggy
features, and diffident reserve, looks like a melancholy Heathcliffor
brooding Byronic poet. He is given to long silences, from which you
expect him to say, "Call me Ishmael."

Bruce, Feld, and I grew up in immigrant families, so we had a
very clear sense of Jarratt's WASP heritage and its centrality to
American culture. At the same time, we saw how this had marooned
him historically and how we were somehow more active, more op-
timistic, freer. Jarratt was like Poe's Roderick Usher, the last of an
ancient dynasty, trapped in his own solitary imagination. His family

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was from Missouri and Kansas, in the traditional, conservative Mid-
west. His father was an Air Force officer who moved from post to
post. Jarratt's residence abroad, including a pivotal year and a half
of adolescence in Morocco, gave him a discernible air of cosmopol-
itanism. His spiritual struggles as a gay man were intricately in-
volved in his antipathy to the militarism of his background. Like
Jim Morrison of the Doors, whose father was a naval officer, he
rebelled against his father's concept of masculinity. Ironically, with
his perfect manners, graceful gestures,. deep, mellifluous voice, and
matinee-idol good looks, Jarratt was most women's dreamboat ideal
man. There is something of Jarratt's manner and appearance in
Mark Frechette's oblique performance in Antonioni's Zabriskie Point
(1970), whose female lead, Daria Halprin, beautifully captures the
electric intelligence and sensuality of Sixties hippie girls.

Our generation was in open revolt against the conformism and
careerist regimentation of the Fifties, symbolized by the film The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). Jarratt's mode of resistance was
passivity and paralysis, which he eloquently articulated with dry
black humor, punctuated by his characteristic long pauses. His re-
finement and stoic withdrawal were like those of Huysmans's aris-
tocratic Des Esseintes. As a consummate aesthete and connoisseur,
Jarratt represents for me the highest development of modern gay
culture. His eye for color, line, and form was exquisite, an innate
talent that cannot be explained by social conditioning. His discourse
on color tones — in films, paintings, fabrics, or sunlight — was spell-
binding. The shadings of red, blue, violet, green: Jarratt made us
see them as material presences in the world.

For Jarratt, perception was everything. He moved in an envelope
of Zenlike stillness, which caught up and tranquilized even manic
creatures like me. Jarratt seemed the real-life embodiment of Walter
Pater's doctrine of pure contemplativeness. This visionary aspect of
the psychedelic Sixties has been too much ignored in retrospective
surveys by the media. The Vietnamese war was only one element
in that turbulent decade and has been overstressed, because it and
the demonstrations against it were photographable, while individ-
ualistic inwardness was not. Jarratt read widely but left little mark
in the classroom. Authenticity resided for him in quiet reflection and
the sharp, truthful observation, shared with friends. His psycholog-

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21 1

ical sense was acute and bonded him to women, whom he treated
with a mixture of caution and respect because of his ambivalent
relations with his powerful, opinionated mother.

If Jarratt was my priest of perception, the cinema was our
church. We worshiped the screen with religious fervor. No one has
adequately documented the revolutionary impact of art films on my
generation. From the moment I saw Roman Polanski's unsettling
Knife in the Water in my first week of college, I was enslaved and
enamored. At Harpur, moviegoing had cult status. My group in
particular believed that avant-garde thought was being created,
frame by frame, in and through film. When Antonioni's languorous
L'Avventura was shown, the crowded college auditorium emptied
within twenty-five minutes — except for a scattering of holdouts, in-
cluding my three friends and me. Monica Vitti's beaky nose and
windswept hair shot this way and that on a rocky island — superb!
Jean Cocteau's eerie Orphe'e, with its angelic poet, leatherboy mo-
torcyclists, and dominatrix of death, nearly gave us cardiac arrest.
When Andy Warhol's Harlot was shown, again the theater emptied,
and again we were virtually alone, this time in the front row. An
expressionless drag queen, ringed by an imperceptibly shifting honor
guard, slowly peels a banana and eats it, as gossips chatter offscreen.
It takes twenty long minutes. We were ecstatic and stayed for a
second showing. Midway through each, Bruce wandered up on stage
and did an absurdist mime in front of the screen, to protest the
audience's restlessness and to signal our connection with Warhol's
vision.

There are two commercial films I associate with Jarratt, since
we saw them together at their release in downtown Binghamton.
One was Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony (1968). In an essay on Eliz-
abeth Taylor, I have described the moment when Jarratt and I cried
out simultaneously, as the star abruptly appeared in a violet suit
and turban against a wall of sea-green tiles. It was one of the high-
lights of my life, an aesthetic epiphany in which joy and pain were
equally mixed. Losey, a gay leftist expatriate, was Jarratt's favorite
director, and we tracked his films for years, sharing information,
hunches, and insights. Thanks to Jarratt's tutelage, I absorbed Lo-
sey's decadent scenarios and suave formalism into my philosophy
of art, as it was to be elaborated in Sexual Personae.

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The other commercial film was Valley of the Dolls (1967), where,
at an afternoon showing in the near-deserted Binghamton theater,
Jarratt and I made unforgivable spectacles of ourselves. Crippled
with helpless laughter, we were literally on the floor. At every glimpse
of a female forearm sporting a clunky, futuristic wristwatch, Jarratt
had convulsions. I was dazzled by the trashy dialogue and spacey
Courreges costumes. Valley of the Dolls, which quickly disappeared,
remained one of my all-time favorite films, and I followed it avidly
when it resurfaced long afterward in shortened, censored form on
late-night TV. Its West Coast resurrection and restoration in the
late Eighties as a gay male classic stunned and delighted me. But
why was I surprised? I seem to have the soul of a gay man.

Certain music reminds me of Jarratt, such as Lotte Lenya's
classic versions of the ironic Weill-Brecht Berlin songs, then widely
available in an elegant double album. Jarratt loved Peggy Lee's "Is
That All There Is?," with its brittle, boozy, devil-may-care litany
of life's sorrows. He played Ravel's "La Valse" for me, and after
some initial impatience, I marveled with him at its escalating ca-
cophony and apocalyptic rhythm, its danse macabre of cultural break-
down. Erik Satie's witty, aimless piano pieces and Ravel's and
Debussy's rich, sinister string quartets were central to our coterie.
At the off-campus Binghamton house Bruce shared with Feld, the
unfurled album cover of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde hung like a
hazy icon on the wall. It was there that I first saw the artful tangled-
hair cover of the Beatles' Revolver album and listened to its glossy
music in mute wonder. The Doors' moody Strange Days encapsulated
our alienation in the depressing pre-Stonewall gay world. Jarratt
remembers the "grim," shabby Binghamton bar where gays con-
gregated. Visiting Greenwich Village, we had to knock with trepi-
dation on a tiny barred door on pitch-black Barrow Street to be
gruffly admitted to a sterile, cramped space lurid with dim red light.
It was like a circle of Hell. The theme music for that bleak period
in our lives is the first Velvet Underground album and Bob Dylan's
"Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Desolation Row." Those songs haunt-
ingly express our crushing sense of isolation and abandonment as
citizens of Sodom.

Jarratt was a collector of neuroses, his own and others'. Part of

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213

the beatnik heritage of the Sixties was the fashion for quirky neu-
roticism, a badge of personal style — quite unlike today's boring
generic categories like "incest survivor" or "child of alcoholic par-
ents." Jarratt was the first person I knew who had "anxiety attacks."
His modernist moods always had a metaphysical dimension. He was
like a psychic barometer of Blake's "invisible worm that flies in the
night in the howling storm." Jarratt's first Harpur roommate, who
suffered from a tyrannical father and was under psychiatric care,
dreamed every night that he was dribbling oranges down an all-
white basketball court. Working with Jarratt at the snack bar was
a large, plump, warm-hearted but compulsive girl who snacked non-
stop on hamburgers fried in butter and who one day plucked out
all her eyelashes and eyebrows in a fit (they took a year to grow
back). Another high-strung girl, a pioneer of the then-unknown ma-
lady of bulimia, screamed uncontrollably at her Jewish refugee par-
ents in ways that were unthinkable in Italian terms. I overheard
Jarratt, sighing, say to her over the phone as they chatted about
friends, "I know. It's hard to talk to people who are very happy."
Jarratt loved Antonioni's Red Desert and identified with the tortured
Monica Vitti in it. "Certain combinations of colors would fill her
with dread," he said to me recently. "She looked so glamourous in
her free-floating anxiety." Like Bruce, he saw and honored the mar-
tyrdom in the great female stars. As he once remarked, "No one
can wring a tear like Susan Hayward."

After graduation, Jarratt and I corresponded regularly. His let-
ters were instantly recognizable in the mail by their sepia ink and
bold italic script, executed with an Ozmiroid art pen. The first major
incident I had to endure without my gay legionnaires occurred in
the summer of 1968, when I ran smack into Catherine Deneuve on
Fifth Avenue. She was my current obsession, and no one had a clue
she was in America. I omit the extraneous details — a Janis Joplin
concert at the Fillmore East, a boy on a bicycle run over by a bus,
my pursuit of Deneuve to the glove department of Saks. Suffice it
to say that, as the violet sky crackled with thunderbolts in the humid
air, I fled wildly up the avenue looking for a phone booth and
hysterically called Jarratt from the St. Regis Hotel. He was then
working in a Binghamton laundromat (where, he likes to say, he

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learned never to put the clothes in until the detergent has dissolved).
I felt like I was on another planet, walking among the gods but
bereft of my boon companions and soulmates.

Like many of the most talented members of my generation,
Jarratt shunned the professions and took only subsistence-level
jobs — cleaning houses in San Francisco or working for many years
for a costume jewelery importer. As sexual personae, we were on
reverse tracks. Galled by the low status of women in the domestic
Fifties, I wanted passionately to achieve in the cultural realm. Am-
bition was my leading trait. Renunciation was Jarratt's. Where he
was passive, I was audaciously active. The militarism that he re-
jected in his father he accepted in me, as an androgynous Aries
warrior. For example, I struck one of the first blows for contemporary
feminism in 1966, when, in the middle of the night on a deserted
Binghamton street, I rescued a tiny female acquaintance of ours
from molestation by young drunks by smashing a captor's mouth
against his teeth with a lucky hit from my gloved hand. He had to
be helped away, bleeding profusely.

After several years in San Francisco, Bruce and Feld moved
back to the East Coast. Jarratt stayed. The avant-garde city by the
bay, a Mecca of sexual liberation to so many gay men, was to be
one of the hatcheries of AIDS. Jarratt saw firsthand the destruction
of our generation's hopes. When he was diagnosed with the disease
in 1989, after being hospitalized with an episode of pneumonia, he
bore it with his customary dignity, stoicism, and gallows humor.
The form his illness has now taken is cytomegalovirus retinitis, a
degeneration of the retina. It is a cruel fate for the aesthete who
lived by his eyes. But Jarratt's vision transcends the physical. He
has been a witness to the whirlwind of the fin de siecle. As both
Sagittarian humanist and devotee of beauty, Jarratt embodies an
ideal synthesis of philosophical detachment with sensory respon-
siveness. His somber perceptions and vibrant imagination continue
in the friends whom he altered and educated.

[On February 2, 1994, two months after this essay was com-
pleted, Stephen Jarratt died at forty-seven in San Francisco. He was
totally blind.]

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

215

STEPHEN HOWARD FELD

As an adolescent in Syracuse, I found a secondhand copy of a book
called The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde. It became my bible. I memorized
its phrases and repeated them until they became part of my brain
chemistry. Wilde's voice, malicious, incisive, insouciant, broke into
the provincial circuit of school, church, and home in Fifties America
like Radio Free Europe. Wilde — followed a few years later by Simone
de Beauvoir — was my first model for radically independent thought,
for cold, clear mind unencumbered by religious morality or social
convention.

When I met Stephen Feld, thanks to Bruce Benderson, in col-
lege, I was amazed to hear him speaking with Wilde's voice. I
automatically gravitated toward him and became his unembarrassed
fan. I followed him around like his kid sister and watched and
listened to him raptly, remembering his witticisms and recording
them in a notebook in my room. Feld was the real-life model for my
extended analysis of Oscar Wilde in Sexual Personae. His everyday
conversation was my key for understanding the brilliant rhetoric and
dramatic dynamics of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Feld was gregarious, brash, and wickedly funny. A Jewish prince
from Long Island, he had been the apple of his vivacious mother's
eye. His glasses and thinning black hair gave him an intellectual
look, but he was well-built, with a solid, agile frame. Feld's confident,
casual, lordly manner attracted people. He was popular with every-
one, gay or straight. While Stephen Jarratt, like Wordsworth, was
most himself when alone, Feld was literally "the life of the party" —
a term I had never fully understood before. Flinging himself down
at the piano, he would bang out medleys of Broadway show tunes
in his muscular manner, singing at the top of his voice. His sense
of fun was infectious. When we rendezvoused at the college dining
hall, Feld, at my request, would do cartwheels and handsprings
across the full length of the entry lounge. He made his own rules,
and the world applauded.

Virginia Woolf identified the inaugural moment (in 1908) of the
irreverent Bloomsbury world of modernist literature and art: the

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young Lytton Strachcy, arriving for a visit, pointed to a stain on her
sister Vanessa's white dress and exclaimed, "Semen?" Wrote Woolf
long afterward, "Can one really say it? I thought & we burst out
laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve
went down." Victorian propriety was over. Sophisticated women of
the Twenties and Thirties often had a freedom of speech and manner
that was lost in the enforced hiatus of the gruelling Second World
War. Middle-class girls of the Fifties were raised by the prudish,
conservative code of Victorian respectability. My generation found
many ways to rebel. Gay men were my liberators. Stephen Feld,
above all, did for me what Lytton Strachey did for the Stephen
sisters. His scathing wit and bold, bawdy talk broke me out of the
jailhouse of gender.

While he was warmhearted and generous as a host and bon vivant>
Feld was intolerant of any kind of false sentimentality. He was far
more accepting than I of different kinds of people, with all their
flaws, yet he had a fearsome talent for unnerving and disorienting,
for doing the unexpected, even if it gave pain. Hurrying to class one
bright winter's day, he and I rounded the outer corner of a dorm
and encountered a long-haired sylph whom I happened to have a
crush on. I became breathless and tongue-tied, as usual, while Feld
drolly leered. Fleeing in haste at the sight of us, the girl slipped on
the ice and went sprawling, her books skidding ten feet in front of
her. Feld openly laughed — the cruel Homeric laughter of Greek
princes at the drubbing of Thersites.

I was mortified at the girl's embarrassment yet stunned with
strange admiration at Feld's shattering of bourgeois etiquette, his
rejection of "niceness." It was a form of truth-telling, a frank ad-
mission of human aggression without the mask of piety. Pre-Stone-
wall gay men had an astonishing sense of masks, their own and
others'. They willfully violated every politically correct tenet — in-
cluding compassion for the handicapped, who became "criplettes."
Whatever was forbidden had to be done or said. For our era of
Romanticism, taboo-breaking remains the route of the heroic.

Feld had a way of sharply rebuffing confidences at tender mo-
ments. The pattern was inconsistent, so there was always surprise
but not necessarily displeasure. It was conversation as rough play.
My favorite incident dates from 1974, when I enthusiastically told

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217

Feld that my Yale friend Bob Caserio had spotted him recently in
New York but that he had disappeared into a building. Feld haugh-
tily replied, "My dear, I never disappear into buildings. I always
linger in the doorways." End of exchange.

Feld's brusque response fascinated me, and I thought about it
for years. It ended up verbatim, with four pages of analysis, in the
manuscript of Sexual Personae, one of the passages Yale Press cut for
space at production deadline. There I had spoken of Feld as a
practitioner of what I called Wilde's monologue exterieur, the poetry
of the English epicene. In this particular conversation-stopper I saw
evidence of Decadent termination or closure, the Apollonian swerve
from Dionysian empathy, the aristocratic refusal to be drawn into
any philanthropic sense of community. I also dwelled on Feld's use
of the doorway as a framing device and of his self-positioning on the
vanishing point. I detected a form of ritual display in which there
was a paradoxical conflation of exhibitionism — even solicitation —
and ritual sequestration, an invocation of the visual in order to
frustrate it.

I felt that Feld's arch riposte proved the oral continuity of the
Wildean tradition over a hundred years and demonstrated the cold
aesthetic formalism in modern male, as opposed to female, homo-
sexuality. A Yale editor raised the question of legal repercussions
from publishing such personal material. When I conveyed this, Feld
declared, "Tell her: I've always lived my life in as public an eye as
possible," and "I am only concerned that there is not enough about
me." Though he offered to sign a release, the editors relegated him,
as he gloomily put it, to "the cutting-room floor."

Like many gay men and unlike, alas, most gay women, Feld
had a sophisticated instinct for fine food, interior decor, and fashion.
He owned (and used as a room-dominating coffee table) a Louis
Vuitton trunk before the line went broadly commercial, and he
preached the doctrine of Bloomingdale's before the store became a
fad. At dinner, he spoke to me severely about the way I ate my
buttered bread wholesale, instead of breaking it into delicate pieces.
It was Feld and Jarratt who showed me that good manners were
suprasexual civilized forms and not just, as I had fiercely thought,
a plot by the authorities to feminize and control women. I became
much less of a rambunctious hellion after my contact with them.

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VAM PS & TRAM PS

What few feminine attributes I may now appear to have were ab-
sorbed from them, which is why many people who hear me speak
have reported that, at hallucinatory moments, there seems to be a
gay man behind the microphone.

At parties, Feld would gather together a huge variety of people
whose only common denominator was him. The moment he would
step away, we would fight like cats and dogs, but his mere presence
seemed to have a magical unifying effect. A girl in our larger college
circle tartly remarked, "Feld has to be surrounded by people. If he
doesn't have an audience, he doesn't exist." This was true in the
best sense: Feld was a theatrical animal, at a time when theater and
dance were redefining American culture. Life itself was a perfor-
mance art for him, as for Bruce. At Harpur, I was active in my own
one-man style of surreal psychodramas and happenings — forty elab-
orate pranks that landed me on probation.

Feld, who played the lead in the campus production of Ibsen's
Rosmersholm, seemed to be considering a career in some area of show
business. With his ingenuity, panache, and facility for making things
happen, he belonged to the great age of vaudeville or Tin Pan Alley.
Feld's friendship with Bruce, which had its ups and downs over the
decades, was closest when they had common artistic interests. Their
difficulties mirrored the conflicts in American Jewish culture, as
portrayed in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, made into a wonderful
film (1969) starring Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin. Bruce
was like Benjamin's pensive character, drawn to the dispossessed
and resisting the natural impulse toward materialism and security
of a people, his own, who had just escaped persecution. Feld's Long
Island, from which so many Harpur students came, was like a nation
unto itself, a vast paradise of middle-class comforts. When I visited
his home in Westbury, he and his mother took me to Fortunoff's, a
fabled nearby store, to experience the human tidal wave of the sub-
urban marketplace. Befuddled by the mad din, I clung to Feld's
sleeve as we forced our way through the throng. It somehow made
perfect sense that the next day, as I drove Feld and his mother
through town, my radiator exploded, and we were stranded.

After graduation, Feld followed the open-ended Sixties pattern
of odd jobs. Returning from San Francisco, he worked for several
years for travel agents in New York. Postcards would arrive from

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219

South America or India, where he led tour groups eleven times —
Around the World with Auntie Mame, we joked. In his late twenties,
Feld began a stable relationship (now twenty-one years old) with a
research biologist, Peter Hollander. They took an Upper East Side
apartment and acquired two tiny, frenetic shih tzu dogs, whom
Feld named Margot (after Margot Fonteyn) and Tallulah (self-
explanatory). In their late twenties, both men returned to school to
study medicine. Peter became a radiologist and Feld a very successful
Park Avenue psychiatrist, an ideal profession for someone with such
a quick take for character and such a gift for putting people at ease.
When the pair went shopping for a weekend country house in the
northern Hudson River Valley, nothing would do, until the weary
realtor said, "There is something you might like" — an old town
grange. Feld walked in, took one look at the platform, and cried,
"At last, my very own stage! We'll take it!" The remodeled grange
of course became a showplace. Feld has, in a sense, reimagined and
reworked the stable married life of his parents' world. But under-
neath it all, his Wildean elitism remains: he subscribes to Royalty, a
British monthly that chronicles the doings of world aristocracy.

In college, my coterie and I were Mods and beats rather than
hippies. Feld cut a striking figure on campus in his green-vinyl car
coat, a badge of British dandyism purchased on Carnaby Street and
"coveted" by Jarratt. It was an exact copy, Feld boasts, of the one
worn by Julie Christie in Paris in Darling, a favorite film of ours. I
affected men's ties, paisley Tom Jones shirts, Edwardian pin-striped
bell-bottoms, naval pea coats, and antique jodhpur boots. My fa-
vorite piece of everyday clothing, however, was Feld's khaki jean
jacket, which I appropriated like a family hand-me-down and wore
for several years. Hard as it may be to understand now, since the
style has become universal, it was a radical gesture for a woman
then. Hippie girls did don their boyfriends' jean jackets, but only
with reinforced feminine iconography — long, flowing hair, peasant
blouses, dirndl skirts. I aggressively wore Feld's jacket with cropped
hair and trousers (as can be seen in a period photo reproduced in
my Vanity Fair profile of September 1992). The hippie clique who
ruled the student-center scene didn't like it one bit, as I certainly
heard while traversing the snack bar on the way to class.

Feld remains for me the symbol of modern gay men's extraor-

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dinary power of personality. His aplomb, audacity, and whiplash
one-liners — delivered with perfect comic timing and his character-
istic European shrug — made him the perfect companion and tutor
for a raging young woman in flight from bourgeois conformism. I
can still hear his inimitable voice twenty years later, in episode after
episode from our lives.

Discussing a friend of his, I asked, "Does she have a good sense
of humor?" Feld replied, "Not really. But she laughs at all my jokes.
I consider that the highest form of humor." When he complained
about the vast amount of information he had to master in medical
school, I said it was well-known that the brain has large numbers
of unused cells. Feld shot back: "My brain is full. Every time I
memorize a medical fact, I forget something about a Betty Grable
movie."

Of a stylishly eccentric college friend of ours who had played
Death in Lorca's Blood Wedding, Feld said to me half a decade after
graduation, "Leona has tried for years to look like everyone else,
and she's finally succeeded." Of her and another Harpur original,
a voluptuous blonde hippie nymph who became one of the organizers
of the People's Park protest at Berkeley, Feld sighed, "My dear, we
are the only ones who have retained our mythic stature."

In 1976, when he and Peter were visiting me in Bennington,
Feld described a recent visit to a gay bar in Boston: "We were
wearing jeans and a shirt, and we were overdressed. You had to
have grease on your hands to get in." The next year, while I was
breakfasting at his mother's house, my eyes quizzically met his as
he poured salt profusely over his plate. He defiantly proclaimed,
"I'm on a salt-free diet. I use salt freely." It was impossible to corner
or capture him. He was as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel. With
a wisecrack and a toss of the head, he would have kept the Spanish
Inquisition at bay.

Bruce Benderson, Stephen Jarratt, and Stephen Feld were the
crucible of consciousness out of which Sexual Personae was born. They
directly inspired many of my images and ideas, and they embodied
an avant-garde philosophy of life based on free speech, intellectual
curiosity, sexual adventure, and theatrical individualism. As I lec-
ture at colleges and universities across America, I am distressed by
the banal sameness of so much student life. Different races, ethnic-

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22 1

ities, social classes, and speech patterns have been systematically
dissolved into a bourgeois blandness that I thought we got rid of
after the Fifties. I feel fortunate in my friends, who in the Sixties
way dared to think and act on a grand scale. For me, creative
enterprise began at home, with my adoptive family of the mind.

JAMES LANDRUM FESSENDEN

James Fessenden, like Stephen Jarratt, came from conservative Prot-
estant Midwestern stock, centered in Indiana and Illinois. His Brit-
ish roots were well-documented: the Fessenden family tree was
centuries old and was outlined in a privately published volume that
Jim paid no attention to. When I first met him in 1972 as a fellow
new colleague on the Bennington College faculty, his outlandish
Sixties costume made him look like a sybaritic eighteenth-century
squire: knee-high crimson-suede lace-up boots, crushed-velvet trou-
sers, mutton-sleeve silk shirts, military greatcoat, and long, curly,
unkempt dirty-brown hair hanging to the waist, as thick as a periwig.
With Jim's chubby cheeks and heavy eyeglasses, it made a strange
effect.

Fessenden, as I tended to call him except in our private mo-
ments, was tall (6' "4"), strong, and broad-shouldered. He was made
for football, but he despised athletics and took no exercise except
walking. His body language was languid, luxurious, half-female, like
that of Delacroix's lounging Sardanapalus. Like me, he was an Aries
and an only child (my sister was born when I was 14, after my
personality was, for better or worse, fully formed). We instantly
recognized each other as fellow aesthetes, passionate devotees of the
religion of art and admirers of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Naturally, I wanted to integrate Fessenden into my college circle
of gay men. But my first efforts were disastrous, and I gave up. At
a restaurant dinner I arranged in New York, Bruce Benderson and
Fessenden bristled at each other, and the evening ended in open
hostility when Fessenden showed undisguised interest in meeting
Bruce's current flame and housemate, a gorgeous Japanese youth
named Nobuo. I remember thinking to myself, gay they may be but
men they still are, with all the snorting, hoof-stomping territoriality

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of bison. Bruce was indignant for years afterward. The two never
met again.

Fcssenden initially came to Bennington to fill in for a year, while
an elderly woman philosopher was on leave. He ended up staying
longer but was finally terminated because, it was rumored, there
had been complaints that to win entrance to the in-group of phi-
losophy students, one had to take drugs with the two young male
teachers and hang out at their on-campus faculty houses. There may
have been some truth in this. Fessenden and his best friend, an
analytic philosopher and straight fellow student from Columbia Uni-
versity who affected a rock-star look (tall and gaunt, with long, curly
black hair and motorcycle sunglasses indoors and out), set a style
of hip, loitering indifference that may not have profited the already
undisciplined children of the rich and famous who were Bennington's
stock-in-trade.

At the start, we brash young Turks offered a serious challenge
to the Bennington establishment, which was mired in a genteel lib-
eralism long on paternalistic sentimentality and short on political
realism. There were many gradations of left-wing to centrist thinking
among us: my close friend, Richard Tristman, for example, had been
fired just before the uprising at Columbia when he gave all his
students A's as a protest against the academic system. Many of the
faculty who went directly from graduate school to Bennington in
the charged late Sixties and early Seventies were heady with a sense
of destiny. We had all the arrogance of youthful talent. We felt
intellectually superior and didn't hide it. We thought we could
change the world overnight. Life was to teach us otherwise.

Fessenden was politically radical throughout our friendship. He
hated authority and the corporate values represented by his busi-
nessman father. Though personally kind, he was contemptuous of
the namby-pamby civilities required for college meetings and com-
mittees. He categorically refused to play the career game required
for advancement in academe. His nemesis was the senior woman
philosopher, who flirted with retirement but returned to dislodge
him. Socially well-connected and married to a trustee of the college,
she was competent but undistinguished and far from informed about
recent issues in her field. Fessenden came to hate her as a symbol
of the old guard, of power and position unjustly attained.

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223

She blocked him, and she defeated him. I felt even then that
Fessenden, in his justified sense of his own merits, was unnecessarily
cruel to her. To the end of his life, he never admitted any fault in
his handling of that first career crisis — which proved to be his last,
since he never completed his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche or
found another academic job. The ferocity with which he darkly
remembered his opponent eventually made me think she was a
shadow of his own frigid, manipulative mother, who put the screws
in, one Christmas in the mid-Seventies, by giving him a leatherbound
book embossed with the title Nietzsche and as the author's name,
"James Fessenden." The pages were blank.

Fessenden was the most comprehensively learned person I have
ever known. Richard Tristman, trained in literature, is also a po-
lymath, with special knowledge of philosophy, theology, science, and
medicine. But Fessenden's breadth of interest extended beyond the
library from intellectual history to the visual and performing arts
and popular culture. He had considered becoming a classical pianist.
As a small child, he studied at the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester. (When asked, on the entrance application, the title of his
favorite composition, he replied, "The prelude to the third act of
Die Walkiire" — i.e., the wild "Ride of the Valkyries.") Music suffused
all one's encounters with Fessenden. He received visitors to his fac-
ulty house — or later his dingy, cramped, cell-like apartment near
Columbia on New York's Upper West Side — in a magic envelope
of sound. He was particularly expert in opera, whose librettos he
minutely studied in their original languages and whose performance
history he catalogued as an avid collector of records and tapes.

Fessenden adored dance, classical ballet above all. He never
missed a major production in Manhattan. A dedicated visitor to
museums and galleries, he read deeply in art history, ancient to
modern, and followed the latest developments in contemporary
painting and sculpture. He haunted bookstores, monitored recent
releases, and had a wide-ranging appreciation of great poetry,
drama, and novels, which he cited with ease. He devoured biogra-
phies and always had some fascinating detail to relay. Like me, he
was a movie fanatic who loved both the Hollywood studio era and
European art films of the postwar decades. He was an aficionado of
Alfred Hitchcock; both of us were crazy about Bernard Herrmann's

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Hitchcock scores, particularly Vertigo, of which Fessenden possessed
a prized early recording. Our ultimate personal film as a duo was
Jacques Rivette's surreal, three-hour, Alice-in-Paris saga, Celine and
Julie Go Boating (1974), which we saw together and discussed with
cultic fervor for years.

Although he had no interest in television, Fessenden knew and
respected popular music. One of our few quarrels was over the
Rolling Stones' great album Aftermath, whose rich sonorities were
destroyed, I insisted, by the new compact disc reissue that Fessenden
was playing with pride for me. The artist I most associate with
Fessenden is David Bowie, who was in his orange-haired, extrater-
restrial, transsexual Ziggy Stardust phase during our early years at
Bennington. The Aladdin Sane album, with its eerie half-embryo/half-
mummy cover photo and its brilliant Scriabin-like piano interlude
on the title song, is pure Fessenden for me. "All the Young Dudes,"
the ominously elegiac song that Bowie wrote for Mott the Hoople,
always reminded me of Fessenden, even more so since his death. It
was a dirge for the new dandyism.

The Sixties cultural revolution, which failed to transform the
academic or literary worlds as it should have, was contained in the
eclectic, interdisciplinary mind of James Fessenden. Discourse with
Fessenden was an extraordinary experience. He brought to bear on
the moment not only his profound philosophic knowledge but his
linguistic and etymological skills. While I never showed work in
progress to him (or to anyone), Fessenden was my primary partner
in dialogue and debate throughout the period when I was writing
Sexual Personae. As I bounced ideas off him, I marveled at the com-
bination of precision and flexibility in his thinking. He caught the
finest shadings of every syllable. He understood the traditional sys-
tems and the warpings I was performing on them. It was a kind of
music: Fessenden heard the dissonance and the jazzlike improvis-
ations I made. Never in my life, before or since, have I been so
blissfully relaxed in serious conversation. Fessenden's consciousness,
both reflective and perceptive, seemed to float like a hawk. He was
a superb audience, goading one to supreme efforts, which he re-
warded with his characteristic guffaw, handclap, or glance of arch
bemusement.

A shared taste of ours that ended up writ large in Sexual Personae

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

225

was the beautiful boy, whom I traced from Greek sculpture to Flor-
entine art and Wilde's Dorian Gray. Only one other woman of my
acquaintance — the London art historian and curator Kristen Lip-
pincott, then my student at Bennington — has ever been equally
entranced by this archetype. The Luchino Visconti film of Thomas
Mann's Death in Venice (1971) had just been released. We went bon-
kers over the publicity still of the seraphic, long- tressed, blonde Bjorn
Andresen as Tadzio. Fessenden had his own Tadzio, or what I was
to call "the beautiful boy as destroyer." He was a heartstoppingly
handsome Italian youth named Raffaello, whom I knew only through
a snapshot. A decade later, I asked Fessenden how long his pursuit
of Raffaello had lasted and what it had led to. "Two years," he
glumly replied. "It led to light bulbs being thrown at me by a
transvestite ballerina."

This was all I ever learned. I assume Fessenden was referring
to his involvement with a downtown troupe of New York dancers
who performed classical ballet in drag. Bitter rivalries split the en-
semble into the Ballet de Trocadero and the Ballet de Monte Carlo,
the latter going on to international success. The founder and star,
Anthony Bassae, known as Karpova, was a close friend of Fessen-
den's who lost control of his own company. He was stocky and round-
faced, with the caramel skin of his native Caribbean. He had a
magnetic presence. When Tony died in New York, an early victim
of AIDS, Fessenden visibly mourned. There was now a permanent
undertone of melancholy in him.

Another, even earlier loss from Fessenden's inner circle was
Lance Norebo, a strange creature with the height and lanky physique
of a basketball player but the haughty manner and carriage of a
fashion model. He had neither home nor possessions. He belonged
to the drag queen underworld of Harlem, the phantasmagoric
"house" culture that produced the notorious dance craze called
"vogueing." Lance, with his skull-like chiseled cheekbones, seemed
Asian but was apparently at least part Portuguese. He looked as
spectral and menacing as one of Melville's harpooneers. He was a
mysterious resident of Fessenden's apartment, coming and going at
will. The two were not involved; Fessenden simply admired Lance's
freedom and style. Lance scorned me as a noisy little woman — until
I sent him a glamourous old newspaper photo of two of his heroines,

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Maria Callas and Merle Oberon, striding in matching gaucho hats
and boots out of a lunchtime New York restaurant. My stock rose
enormously after that.

Once, in midafternoon, while Lance was still sleeping, his friend
Gaga, a fellow drag queen, telephoned. Fessenden could not rouse
the drowsy, snappish Lance. "Well," sniffed Gaga, "just tell her it's
Audrey's birthday — and hung up in a huff. The words were barely
out of Jim's mouth when Lance leaped from bed like a comet, flung
on some clothes, and raced frantically out of the apartment. Audrey
Hepburn, thanks to Breakfast at Tiffany's, was a principal divinity
among queens, and her birthday was a high holy day. Lance ate
next to nothing — "a few grains of rice" per day, with a cup of tea,
according to Fessenden, who attributed Lance's lack of resistance
to the AIDS virus to this monkish abstemiousness. When he fell ill,
Lance was camping in an abandoned building on the Lower East
Side, to which he had pursued a romantic interest. A month later,
he was dead. Only afterward, as he was trying to locate Lance's
relatives, did Fessenden realize, to our shock, that "Norebo" was a
pseudonym: "Oberon" spelled backwards. Both Fessenden and I
revered and honored drag queens for their power of imagination and
imperious rejection of banal reality.

Fessenden had returned to New York, after being forced out of
Bennington, at exactly the moment gay bathhouse culture was mov-
ing into high gear. I was used to accompanying my male friends to
their bars and vice versa, a vestige of the pre-Stonewall era when
provincial cities usually had just one gay bar, in which the sexes
mingled. I remember when the doors of the men's bars closed in
my face. It was probably 1974; the hostility to a female presence
was palpable. The reason: pitch-black orgy rooms and sex shows —
chained men sodomized in slings — were coming into fashion. Upset
at this divorce from my friends, I tried to pass in drag. An amused
Stephen Feld loaned me his battered leather aviator's jacket and
smuggled me, hair slicked back, into a crowded New York bar, where
I tried to blend. But mannish as I am, I made an unconvincing
male and aroused notice. I had to accept the fact that, as a woman,
I was persona non grata in the new gay garden of earthly delights.

With his indolence, nocturnal habits, and voyeuristic tastes,
Fessenden took to the bathhouse scene immediately. He was gen-

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227

erally secretive about his sex life, but he told me enough of his
experiences there — seeing a naked, well-endowed Rudolf Nureyev,
for example — to whet my appetite and envy. It was a realm, based
on nudity and gargantuan promiscuity, that I obviously could never
enter, even in drag. Fessenden's standards of hygiene were never
that strict to begin with — another of his eighteenth-century traits,
which worsened as the years passed. The degeneration of his apart-
ment, uncontrollable as he became ill, is unimaginable in female
terms. I often wonder whether the health risks in that hot, humid
bathhouse underworld of thrilling sexual adventure would have been
more obvious to women than to the men who, for complex reasons
they never faced, shut women out.

My epitaph for Fessenden: He lived, and he died. I mean by
this that he lived life fully, sating himself on the pleasures of the
mind and the pleasures of the body. He was not prudent. He post-
poned no gratification. He spurned the caution and frugality of his
Protestant ancestors. Like so many members of our generation, he
chose sensuality and the quest for truth over pensions, security,
materialism. With his slow, grand movements and dreamy contem-
plativeness, he seemed to view each hour as a crystal goblet to be
filled with rare wine. Of all my friends, he was the most inveterate
drug-taker — marijuana and later cocaine, which surely (though he
never admitted it) had something to do with the gold plate surgically
installed to fill a hole in his sinus. Cocaine for him, as for Freud,
gave clarity and command: thinking was his deepest self. At the
end, he was making huge withdrawals for drugs from a large cash
reserve unwisely deposited in a non-interest-bearing checking ac-
count. It was the remnant of his inheritance from his dead parents.
His luxury, excess, and solitude reminded me of the extravagant,
impacted language of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems I loved in
high school. As adolescents marooned in the provinces, Fessenden
and I had had the same longing for sophistication and beauty.

While our romantic lives were separate, there was one area of
pleasure we ardently shared: food. My friendship with Fessenden
was a symposium in the original Greek sense: we ate, drank, and
talked ideas for hours on end. The electric connection we were trying
to establish, as Sixties rebels, between thought and sensation was
reified in our conduct. Eating and drinking, rather than drug-taking,

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have always been my Mediterranean mode of testing and pushing
my own neurotransmitters. Fessenden and I were systematically
exploring the brain. It was a psychedelic undertaking. My generation
treated inner like outer space, which Star Trek, our symbolic saga,
calls "the final frontier." In the theoretical terms of Sexual Personae,
Fessenden enjoyed unusually close communication between his
Apollonian and Dionysian sides. He fulfilled in his own being the
dual consciousness I see as crucial for intellectuals of the twenty-
first century.

My substitute for LSD was Indian food, to which Fessenden
introduced me and which became a constant theme of our exchanges.
It began in 1973 during a short visit to Bennington by the brilliant
British philosopher Gillian Rose, the last woman Fessenden (as a
graduate student) had dated. She concocted a fantastic Indian soup,
golden-mustard in color and silty with twelve fresh-ground spices.
It packed a wallop: I was hung over for two days. In New York,
Fessenden took me to his favorite restaurant, the hole-in-the-wall
Bit of Bengal on upper Broadway, where I had my first ultra-hot
lamb vindaloo, a seductive culinary rut I have never escaped, no
matter how resolutely I scan the rest of the menu. There Fessenden,
languorous as Lewis Carroll's hookah-smoking caterpillar, ordered
my first ambrosial, rust-red mulligatawny soup and educated me
about its proper ceremonious consumption. "Really, Camille," he
thundered, as I gulped it down. Obscure Indian restaurants all over
New York became the scene of my spice-triggered psychedelic
"trips" with Fessenden. After our mammoth feasts, I would smoke
a cigar as, gorged and happy, we strolled the streets.

It was for another Indian sojourn that I rendezvoused with
Fessenden at the big black cube sculpture on Astor Place in May
1989. The dinner was to be celebratory: the edited manuscript of
Sexual Personae, after endless headaches, conflicts, and white-knuckle
negotiations, had just gotten the go-ahead for production at Yale
Press. I had visited Fessenden only a month before, so I was not
prepared for what I saw. His classic expression of casual, smug
confidence was completely gone (and never to return). He looked
sweaty and distracted. I saw desperation and fear in his eyes. The
shock took my breath away. Earl Mountbatten said of the sudden,
premature death of his wife, "It was a poleax blow." I knew my life

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229

would never be the same. A picture of my future isolation, like a
desert landscape, flashed before me.

Fessenden curtly fended off my concerned queries about how
he was feeling — "too many drugs," he claimed and never budged
from that story. He had always refused to discuss health matters,
even bad colds, with me. We were fraternal Aries warriors; he had
the stubborn pride and victor mentality of an athlete. Thus began
the charade we played to the end. The word "AIDS" never passed
between us, except about others. Before dinner that evening, we
stopped for an errand at the apartment of one of Fessenden's mu-
sician friends, who was traveling abroad. Sitting down at the mag-
nificent grand piano, Fessenden began to play from memory —
Chopin and Liszt. I had never seen him so open or vulnerable. Lost
in thought, he was literally playing his heart out. I knew it was his
anguished leave-taking, his farewell to what might have been. Lying
on the Oriental carpet, I was oppressed by a sense of the tragic
waste and self-destruction of my generation.

At the tiny table in the dark restaurant on 6th Street, I gave an
award-winning performance. I chattered, gossiped, entertained, and
gobbled paratha bread and lemon pickle as usual. Pointedly spearing
and devouring delicacies near or on Fessenden's plate, I tried to
suggest he had nothing to fear from admitting his condition; he would
not be ostracized as dangerous or contaminated. It was a gruelling,
futile effort. His mood remained grim. Driving back to Philadelphia
after dinner, I sped into the first rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike
and frantically telephoned Bruce Benderson to pour out my grief
and anxiety. It was one of the worst days of my life. Exultation had
turned to horror. "Count no man happy," says Greek drama.

Several years passed before Fessenden's illness, heralded by
> bouts of pneumonia, was obvious to others. By the fall of 1991, he
was barely leaving his apartment. Since he had no family left, aside
from a few elderly Midwesterners he had lost contact with, an ad
hoc group, half dozen in number, of Fessenden's friends, ex-students,
and proteges began to confer about him. Gillian Rose and her
mother, an AIDS volunteer, visited from London to assess and sig-
nificantly improve the situation. Roger Kimball, who had studied
with Fessenden at Bennington and toward whom I had always been
unfairly hostile, proved himself a man of honor and integrity by

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

taking charge of Fessenden's legal and financial affairs and bringing
in expert help to untangle the mess.

Fessenden's primary malady was a massive overgrowth of fungal
microbes in his body, crippled by autoimmune deficiency. Little
showed externally, except for a severe weight loss. His mind began
to slow, and he became progressively less responsive, indifferent to
conversation or even music. I regularly telephoned semiweekly but
could see him rarely. While he was hospitalized in the spring of ]
1992, Lauren Hutton, who had expressed a desire to meet him,
accompanied me on a visit. In May, at the conclusion of her semester
at the University of Sussex, Gillian Rose flew to New York. It was
as if, she later said to me, Jim had waited for her in order to die.
She was in the hospital with several others as he began to fail. They
sat for hours in the corridor until, at 1 A.M., the doctors informed
them that Jim had died. Gillian immediately called me in Phila-
delphia with the news.

The prognosis had been so pessimistic for so long that there was -
neither surprise nor shock in Fessenden's passing. And there had
been such a transformation and reduction of him, physically and
mentally, that the real Fessenden seemed to have vanished. Most
of us felt relief that the towering intellect he had been would have
to endure no more humiliations to his frail shell of a body. My worst
moment had been the first stunning revelation at Astor Place. After
that, I had made a fatalistic adjustment to reality. It was, I liked
to think, the steely pragmatism of the soldier.

Three weeks after Fessenden's death, I was in London for the
release of the Penguin paperback of Sexual Personae. As I was fielding
questions from the stage of the Institute of Contemporary Art, with
Gillian Rose in the audience, I began to describe the painful, lonely
childhood of sensitive and artistic gay men in macho America. To
my astonishment, huge tears began to stream down my face. Why
only in public? Because it was the public realm where Fessenden
belonged. And because his failure to enter it was partly due to his
noble refusal to deform the philosophic quest by concern for money,
status, or power. The audience I addressed was rightfully his.

The Fessenden who will live on for me is the one who, after
meeting her in London, was a devoted fan of Ava Gardner, whose
wildcat temperament seemed to express what he could not assert in

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

23 1

reality. There was a trace of this in his attitude toward me. All of
my gay male friends treated me with the same blend of amused

i exasperation and affection; they saw my absurdity at the same time
as they admired my pugnacious energy. In a way, I was their proxy
for conventional masculine action. Fessenden enjoyed my scrapes
and scandals at Bennington, which ranged from a public ass-kicking
to claims of clairvoyance to fisticuffs at a college dance, the latter
of which led, after a clash of lawyers, to my departure. In my pro-
cessing of Sixties politics, disruptive behavior was a form of civil
disobedience. Matured by disaster, I ended up with more respect
for institutions and their needs than did Fessenden, who never turned
his aggression directly on his oppressors.

Fessenden's campus house at Bennington, Ludlow Studio, was

, the site-of-origin of my beloved cat, Numa Pompilius, an elegant
blue-gray stray who had been hanging around for months until I
adopted her. Numa, who had a distinct and well-deserved superiority
complex, was my inseparable companion for fifteen years, through-
out the writing of Sexual Personae. She was the model for my autocratic
portrait of cats and their mystic symbolism in Egypt. For many
years, Fessenden owned a shaggier gray-and-white cat, similarly
from the Bennington countryside, whom he named Camille.

I also associate Fessenden with Yasmin Aga Khan, who became,
as our friend Karen Colvard put it, my "hobby." Though we never
spoke, I became fascinated with Yasmin when, during my first week
at Bennington in 1972, I caught what appeared to be a beautiful
Arab boy staring at me across the mail room. The more florid Span-
ish features of her mother, Rita Hayworth, only came out in Yasmin
long afterward. Hayworth, looking regal in a muted beige dress, was
in attendance at Yasmin's senior recital in 1973. Fessenden and I
were loud and obnoxious at the reception.

Back in New York, Fessenden whiled away his slow hours at
the police archives (the improbable job he had until the end) by
culling piquant items for me from the tabloid gossip columns. His
envelopes bore the return address "Celebrity Service," which even-
tually turned into an allegorical personage, "Celebrite," my satirical
nickname for him. Thanks to the vigilance of Celebrite, we zestfully

e followed Yasmin (or, as Jim called her, "Yasmaga") through her

a many adventures, from Margaret Trudeau to various globetrotting

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suitors and husbands. In the late Seventies I had a close encounter
with Yasmin, an astrakhan-clad woman friend, and a visibly shaky
Hayworth in, of all places, the glittering Islamic Rooms of the Met-
ropolitan Museum of Art. I was thunderstruck but for once had the
sense to leave them alone.

Throughout our friendship, Fesscnden and I discussed French
literature and culture, a subject in which I felt at home, since my
father taught French and had brought back from a year at the
Sorbonne, when I was a toddler, many books about the Louvre,
Versailles, and Fontainebleau that had a great impact on me. Fes-
senden and I admired the Roland Barthes of Mythologies but were
less enthusiastic about his later development. We liked Gilles De-
leuze's book on masochism but again felt the sequel was lacking.
Expert in German, Fessenden enjoyed reading the poststructuralists
in French, though he never overestimated their importance as did
American literature professors, for whom he had withering scorn.

From our first acquaintance, Fessenden kept telling me that
what I was doing in English was very similar to what Lacan was
doing in French, but I found Lacan boring, pompous, imprecise,
and ahistorical. We often argued about Foucault, whom Bruce
Benderson was also fond of. Many years of bickering and stalemate
skirmishes passed before Bruce had a key epiphany: he finally ad-
mitted, under Amazonian pressure, that Foucault's cold, invigorat-
ing discourse was refreshingly woman-free. I never pressed this point
with Fessenden, since I knew in my bones it was too true of him
and his attraction to Foucault.

In the spring of 1993, at a panel discussion on political cor-
rectness with Robert Hughes in Washington, D.C. that was filmed
for British television, Edward Said congratulated me on the stand
I had taken against New Historicism, with its bourgeois assumptions
and vulgar inaccuracies. I told him that his intellectual successors
were not the opportunistic mediocrities who have won tenure at our
major universities but rather the authentic leftists of my generation
who rejected the sycophancy of the career system and drifted out
into the general culture. I passionately declared, "Your heir is
dead — James Fessenden," whose mentor and dissertation advisor
had been Arthur Danto, Said's friend and colleague at Columbia.

When I descend like a demon on Harvard or any other university

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

233

where I lecture, it is Fessenden whom I am avenging with my wrath.
The most feted names of our generation of humanities professors
are a callow lot, unlearned and uncultivated. America deserved bet-
ter. By recovering what we can from the ruins of the Sixties, we can
help the next generation to learn from our mistakes. This is our
legacy.

DR. PAGLI A

PART ONE OF FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR
A FOUR-PART DOCUMENTARY BY M O N I KA TREUT

Pan of 42nd Street, New York City on a rainy night. Traffic noise. CAMILLE
PAGLIA strolling past the porn theaters and adult bookshops. Voiceover of
PAGLIA conversing with BRUCE BENDERSON.

PAGLIA: I was so miserable here, twenty-five years ago.

BRUCE BENDERSON: Really?

PAGLIA: Yes, in graduate school. You remember.

BENDERSON: Mmmmm . . . vaguely.

PAGLIA: I still have no sex life. But even then it was very intense.
My hormones were at their height.

BENDERSON: I do remember sitting on a rock here waiting for a go-
go dancer that I knew to come and meet you for the afternoon.
I was trying to fix you up with a female go-go dancer.

PAGLIA: Yes, there's an example! There's an example of the misery
of my life. My sex life has been a disaster.

[Produced and directed by Monika Treut. Volcano Pictures for Hyena
Films. Filmed in Philadelphia and New York, November 1991. Released in

1992.]

23A

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 235

benderson: Yeah.

(Shot of PAGLIA and BENDERSON sitting on couches in the Helen Hayes
Suite of the Milford Plaza Hotel, overlooking 8th Avenue. There is a lavish
spread of food on the table between them. PAGLIA eats constantly as she speaks
throughout the film.)

PAGLIA: I mean, every time I try, like, to seduce a woman, I've just
been . . . hopeless. It's like people can't take me seriously! I
mean, I think that — I don't know —

BENDERSON: I think that you unconsciously subvert it, in many
cases.

PAGLIA: What is it then? What do you think it is?

BENDERSON: You get to the point of consummation, then something
in you says that it's wrong, and you make sure that it doesn't
happen.

PAGLIA (perplexed): I don't know what it is.
BENDERSON: It's the Catholic part of you.
PAGLIA: You think?
BENDERSON: Yes!

PAGLIA: But, you know, / think it's something else. I think on some
level that I'm slightly absurd. I'm an absurd, rather comical
person.

BENDERSON: Well, I agree with that! (They laugh.)

PAGLIA: No one can really take me seriously. Men can take me
seriously as a sex object because, you know, I have tits and ass,
like that. And I do feel the lust between men and women.

BENDERSON: Oh yeah, we love those tits and ass, babe!

PAGLIA: Yeah! And so —

BENDERSON: Shake 'em!

PAGLIA: Right!

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

BKNDKRSON: Go ahead! Yeah!

PAG LI A (laughing): Right! Shake it! But the thing is that women don't
take me seriously at all as, you know, as a seducer. I'm just
ridiculous, and so, I mean, I've never succeeded.

( Cut to Fifties footage of typical mother in heels and plaid summer dress fussing
over small daughter with blond ringlets on their stoop. Voiceover begins of
PAG LI A at the Egyptian gallery of the University Museum of the University
of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.)

PAG LI A (with air of disgust): As a child in the early 1950s in America,
I was being asked to identify with bride dolls, things like this.
There would be, like, these lacy images of brides. I was expected
to collect these dolls and so on. It was the period of Debbie
Reynolds and Doris Day and these sorority queen blondes. Girls
were supposed to be "nice" and feminine and so on, and instead
I was identifying with things like this from Egyptian culture.
(Gestures toward black stone object next to her.) And here we have,
like, a tombstone, okay? — or in some cases a stele that could just
be a monument commemorating something that happened dur-
ing a king's reign. You see, everything about this, to me, was
anti the 1950s, anti the bourgeois culture of that period, because
you have these mystic images, cryptic signs. Here we have a
rapacious falcon or hawk, all right? I've always identified very
strongly with carnivorous kinds of animals. I'm a kind of dom-
inating, aggressive woman who just was totally out of sync with
culture at that time.

I suppose one could say that it {indicating the object) has a hard
phallic quality, but the monumentality of Egyptian culture, its
imperialistic statements, its assertiveness attracted me enormously.
Plus the idea of cryptic signs and so on. I've always been fas-
cinated by visual emblems, and I find an exact correlation be-
tween something like this, which I could not have understood
as a child, and advertisements of the period. I couldn't read as
a small child, but I would see images and people doing strange
things — you know, people holding a box, or holding a box out
like this (she demonstrates in the 1950s style of Betty Furness), which
later I could read — TIDE SOAP. So I felt since earliest childhood

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

237

that advertisements were never something that was just popular
culture and not to be taken seriously. But rather right from the
beginning I saw that there was a connection between ancient
pagan culture and the popular culture all around me which,
let's say, my parents would not take seriously. My parents were
very against commercialism and advertisements and so on. I
had a kind of stubborn interest in the cryptic signs of adver-
tisement. So for me the Egyptian hieroglyphics and advertise-
ments are in the same line. And it's true. As I went on, I learned
that the great pharaohs were advertising themselves. That's what
they were doing — "I am the greatest, I am the most fabulous."
Which they've done now. Five thousand years later, we're still
reading their signs.

( Cut back to PAGLIA and BENDERSON in the New York hotel.)

PAGLIA: Being a strong woman, okay, a strong sexual woman, is an
absolute horror — because there are very few things that you can
do, okay? Really, the number of opportunities for sexual adven-
turism available to men — it's just appalling — through history!

BENDERSON: Well, I believe that's true image-wise, but I don't see
why you have to follow all these social rules.

PAGLIA: It's undignified!

BENDERSON: But —

PAGLIA: It's sleazy! It just is!
BENDERSON: Well, I —

PAGLIA: When Cher — look — Madonna is also in a similar situation
apparently. She's at a point where there's no man as strong as
she is, right? And so she has this problem. And now the rumors
are, in these new biographies, that she takes the limousine, picks
up Hispanic, you know, beautiful Latino youths ofT the street,
has sex with them in a limo, deposits them off! (Laughs.) I mean,
that seems to me a very good reconciliation —

BENDERSON: Oh, so you're worried about press coverage.

PAGLIA: No, no! It's a matter of dignity. She retains her dignity by
having her limousine, and doing it in the limousine.

238 VAMPS & TRAMPS

BENDERSON: Darling, dignity is — oh, she maintains her dignity —

PAGLIA: Yeah, she maintains her dignity. I fail to see how —

BENDERSON: Well, all we need is a limousine for you.

PAGLIA: Right. My Pontiac Grand Am isn't quite as, uh, dignified.

BENDERSON: All right. We'll rent a limousine for you next time.

PAGLIA (thoughtfully)'. Yeah, yeah. 'Cause, see, I like sex with men.
I have no problem with that. I mean, I can't stand these lesbians
who get on talk shows and say, "Oh! Oo! Oo! Men don't do
anything for me," or "Penises are ugly," or things like that. I
have no problem with that, okay, at all. It's just that men . . .
men . . . once you get beyond the level of their sexuality, then
you get into this political area. You know, they have to compete.
My crushing intellect becomes a problem to them.

BENDERSON: I agree. One should never get beyond the level of
sexuality with men.

PAGLIA: This is the point.

BENDERSON: They're totally uninteresting.

PAGLIA: Exactly. Yes, yes. And then, when I say this, the feminists
accuse me of treating men as if they were merely bestial or as if
they were incapable of an emotional life —

BENDERSON: Oh, you're exciting me!

PAGLIA: — when in fact my entire book is about the emotional life
of men. What?

BENDERSON: You're exciting me.

PAGLIA: How? About what?

BENDERSON: Talking about bestiality in men.

PAGLIA (sighing): I know. At least you've had some bestiality.

( Cut to vintage Wild West footage of leering cowboy mauling and bussing a
frantic young woman. Cut to PAGLIA sitting on the floor with MONIKA
TREUT in the University Museum in Philadelphia.)

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

239

PAGLIA: What I'm opposing is the anti-intellectualism of contem-
porary feminism. Feminism in its current phase began as a
movement of eccentric individualists, but it has really rigidified
into a kind of cult. They're like Moonies. They are really reli-
gious thinkers who usually have separated in some way from
their religious background or their cultural background. They
are people looking for an identity, okay? And such people are
absolutely — They have not really examined their own assump-
tions. They're not intellectuals. So as a consequence, when you
challenge them, they become very emotional, because they have
no equipment for responding to you. Feminism today in America
has become simply a series of rote, learned, jargon phrases. So
if you try to critique their view of rape, let's say, they get very
angry, and all they can do is parrot back to you something
they've learned — a statement like (imitates droning computer voice)
"Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex." They're like robots,
okay? They've been programmed. Or they'll say something like
"No always means no."

Now, both these statements are stupid. They absolutely are
meaningless, all right? And what I'm doing is I'm going around
as an intellectual, not just as a feminist but as an intellectual,
and I am seizing on and attacking each of these jargon phrases
and exposing them, and I'm doing it by shock tactics. For ex-
ample, this business about snuff films, all right, which is like,
oh, snuff films, this huge nightmare vision of contemporary anti-
porn feminists. And so I'm doing things like saying, "Let snuff
films be made!" Now I don't mean, of course, a film in which
a real woman is killed. When we go to a mystery story, we don't
want to see a real woman, a real person being murdered. When
we go to Hamlet, we don't want to see, like, ten people being
killed by the end — the same thing with the Oresteia or anything
else. But I'm saying that whenever there's a taboo, it's the
absolute obligation of the artist and intellectual to seize on that
taboo and to shatter it. In other words (cut to vintage footage of
plump, middle-aged women being punched and pummeled by early exercise
equipment), all these tender places in the contemporary ideol-
ogy — we must push on them, palpate them, make people squeal,
okay? So I'm doing that also for things like the battered wife

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motif, the battered woman. People are always, like, you know,
wringing their hands and sobbing over these victims.

I hate the victim-centered nature of contemporary feminism!
It's loathsome to me. I believe woman is the dominant sex, okay?
And that everyone knows this, everyone knows throughout world
culture that woman dominates man. Everyone but feminists knows
that! And I think that it's absolutely perverse and neurotic to
insist that history is nothing but male oppressors and female
victims. This is ridiculous, all right? They want to make women
small! (She angrily gestures with thumb and index finger.) Is this fem-
inism? To make women small, to make them into victims? This
is absurd! What I see is going on between the sexes, you see, is
war. I'm an Aries. I have no trouble with war. I'm a combative
personality. I believe that war and combat are the way that we
form our identities. All great artists have in some sense warred
with their religion, with their culture, with their family, with
others, with the artists who came before them. And so conflict
and aggression are at the center of my system. ( Cut back to PAGLIA
and BENDERSON.) I've seen a film of a female cat mating, breed-
ing, and I identify with it so powerfully.

BENDERSON: Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

PAGLIA: Because the cat is an isolated animal, like me, a solitary
animal, and you can see that she's driven by these hormones to
mate, to breed —

BENDERSON: Yes.

PAGLIA: — but she's angry at having to submit.
BENDERSON: Yes!

PAGLIA: And you have this war going on between this male cat and
this female cat, and (imitates growling and scratching cat) she's, like,
clawing him, okay? And he's waiting, waiting. Eleven times he
may penetrate her with this kind of penis that has a hook on it
that injures her.

BENDERSON: Yes! It's very hard and bony.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 241

PAGLIA: Yes. And I identify with that so powerfully. And I say, yes,
that's me. I am like this completely carnivorous, solitary, self-
ruling animal, like a cat.

benderson: Right.

paglia: You know? And I want to mate, and nature pushes me very
powerfully to mate, but then I wanna kill. See, I hate this sort
of, to me, saccharine or cloying intimacy — I don't mean to
characterize you!

benderson: Oh do, please!

PAGLIA (laughing): No, no, I'm not categorizing you! But I'm in flight
from this thing in the American bourgeoisie. Which is this thing
of being nice, making nice, and nurturing, coddling and so on. I
just can't do that. That's my problem with relationships, that
I can't do it.

BENDERSON: I don't totally believe that, because you're very nur-
turing to me sometimes, over our long relationship.

PAGLIA: That's to my friends. That's to my immediate friends.

BENDERSON: So you can't give some of this abbondanza around, you
know, sort of spread it around outside of your circle of friends?

PAGLIA: I have trouble getting it together with sex. When I get that
with someone, the sex seems to leave. That's my problem.

BENDERSON: Really? How interesting.

PAGLIA: Yeah. As a woman, I just can't get nurturance and sex
together. I cannot.

BENDERSON: To other women you can, though.

PAGLIA: Well, yeah. Susie Bright criticized me, you know, for saying
that I feel we need less intimacy, not more, with sex. I think
that intimacy kills sex.

( Cut to technicolor footage of formally dressed Fifties couple toasting each other
with clinking coffee mugs. A lush soundtrack swells. Cut back to PAGLIA and

242

VAMPS & TRAMPS

TREUT sitting on the museum floor. PAGLIA makes wild Italian gestures
throughout this scene.)

PAGLIA: Now feminists today, as I see it, are the heirs of Rousseau.
They believe (imitates prissy woman with singsong voice) we're born
naturally good and whatever is nasty about us, we got that from
an unjust social system. So if there's rape, why, no one would
ever rape naturally. It must be coming from pornography! Yes,
pornography! Men are taught to rape by pornography! (With
disgust) This is so stupid. Rape has occurred everywhere in his-
tory, okay? Rape is simply a brutal form of the will to power,
okay? Men are taught not to rape. The idea that feminism dis-
covered rape, that feminists alone are the ones who have decried
the violence of rape . . . absurd! Feminism — it is mired in the
shallow present, it is so ignorant about culture! Men throughout
history have condemned rape. Ethical men have always done
that, for heaven's sakes. (Angrily) I mean, the fall of the tyrants
in Rome was because of the rape of Lucretia by Tarquin, right?

So we teach people by ethical rules of society — whether it's
through morality in religion or by just the rational code of
ethics — not to murder, not to steal, not to rape. Now, feminism
is focusing on rape at the college level, at the freshman year.
(Imitates breathlessly posturing Joan of Arc feminist) "We can stop
rape by passing grievance committee rules!" Is this stupid? Is
this ignorant? I mean, first of all, my generation of girls, we
were raised in the Fifties, where you had to be a virgin, okay?
We arrived in college in 1964, and we were kept in all-girl dorms,
locked at eleven o'clock at night. We had to sign in. My gen-
eration's the one that broke through that in America and said,
"No more rules!" We said to the colleges, "Get out of our sex
lives! Let us have the freedom to risk danger, to risk rape. Get
out, okay?" Now today, feminism is so stupid, it wants authority
figures back into sex! It wants authority figures (imitates unctuously
paternalistic bureaucrat) — "Okay, what happened on this date?
Oh, he put his hand on your left breast? Oh, that was wrong,
wasn't it? Punish him!" (Slaps her own hand)

This is ridiculous. Women must take full responsibility for their
sexuality. I'm saying to women not to stay home, all right, but

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

243

rather, accept the idea of sex. Every time you go on a date with
a man, the idea of sex should be in the air, okay? If it's not in
the air, if you're not understanding that, why are you going on
a date? These feminists seem to think that dating was something
created on Mount Sinai, that God handed down the Ten Com-
mandments (imitates divine table-inscribing): "And then, you shall
date!'" This is absurd. Unchaperoned dating is something very
recent in history. It's confined to the industrialized democracies.
Even in Germany, I understand, this idea of dating, as under-
stood here, this great thing you do — you get up (imitates primping
and flouncing) and get all ready to go out on a date — this is
something very new. It's absurd! These feminists who think that
they can totally reform the way men relate to women by focusing
in on college dating, they are so parochial, so provincial! Now,
my view of sexuality — (jump cut back to PAGLIA and BENDER-
SON,) — Because I do believe in telling all, and I don't believe in
playing games, and that's one of my problems. I think that sex
is a game — and I have a great trouble flirting and playing the
game.

BENDERSON: Exactly.

PAGLIA: Because I'm too simple. I'm an Aries. I'm absolutely
simple — and simplistic, even.

BENDERSON: So you think it's because you're not holding anything
back that you eventually turn the woman off?

PAGLIA: I feel this is the intimacy problem again. You keep on saying
we should have intimacy, and I feel that my error has been maybe
to, like, put too much intimacy into the sex connection. You
know, maybe I should be treating it more cerebrally, more ab-
stractly.

BENDERSON: That could be.

PAGLIA: See, I don't exploit people. I'm terrible at that. And so, I
think that in some sense sexual contact is — there's a self-
withholding going on in it that I'm not capable of. And you're
right, I think I just show too much.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

BENDERSON: Right. A good hunter is self-possessed. Is that what
you mean?

PAGLIA: Hmmmm. I think there's a predatory aspect to sexual con-
quest that I completely lack. (Ruefully eating) I don't know, I mean,
I'm in my forties now, and people still think I'm very youthful.
You know, I get along great with children. There's something
about me that's presexual. It's like I never got over my what
Freud calls polymorphous — you know, the pansexuality — po-
lymorphous perversity. But in certain ways, I don't think I've
ever progressed into the dating stage yet! Dating is still something
very difficult to me.

BENDERSON: Well, do you feel sexual towards children?

PAGLIA (pondering it): No, but I feel absolutely at one with children.
Children between the ages of three and eight. And I feel that's
where I sort of have stopped. And so I feel totally sexual in a
kind of whole-body way, but I find it difficult coupling. Coupling
is very difficult to me. I mean, I think that most powerful and
talented women — I mean, really powerful women like me — have
had some sort of difficulty with sexual adjustment in ways that
very powerful men don't necessarily have. Some powerful men
have had these problems, but I think that every very, very
talented woman in some way has difficulty in how to relate
sexually to other people. And that's been my problem.

( Cut to vintage footage of crone shooting pistols at lightbulbs and other targets
held by women or small children. Cut to PAGLIA standing beneath large, pink-
granite pharaonic sphinx at the University Museum. She addresses the camera.)

PAGLIA (sternly): I have never identified with Christianity. The only
elements in it that I identified with are those in Roman Ca-
tholicism that / have identified in my writing as pagan, the
pagan elements in it. Whether it's the sexual personae of the
martyred saints . . . Saint Sebastian, with the arrows sticking
out of his body — he's a kind of parallel to the beautiful boys of
Greek art and so on and so forth. There was just something in
the humbleness of Christianity, Saint Joseph and Mary and the
baby and so on, that I absolutely rejected. I just felt like such an

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 245

alien, not only a sexual alien but a social alien, in my own time.
So dreaming about ancient Egypt and studying it was my escape,
you see, from what I regarded as (disdainfully) the humiliating
simplicities and humbleness of Christianity that we were being
taught. Turn the other cheek and all that. Well, I don't believe
that for a minute. I don't think any Italian really does. We
believe in war!

(Jump cut to PAGLIA and BENDERSON,)

PAGLIA (laughing): Well, I'm a bisexual lesbian who's also monastic,
celibate, pervert, deviant, voyeur.

BENDERSON: Are you masochistic?

PAGLIA (pondering it): No, I don't think I'm masochistic. I don't think
at all. Because I'm very self-preserving. I don't like suffering. I
don't think I'm masochistic.

BENDERSON: Right! Well, masochists are very self-preserving. That's
the mechanism of self-preservation in their masochism.

PAGLIA (still pondering): I really don't think I'm masochistic. I don't.

BENDERSON: They're masochistic in order not to feel something
worse.

PAGLIA: I don't see it, except in, uh, the sex act. (Smiling sheepishly)
I enjoy being on the bottom.

BENDERSON: Oh, tell me more about that!

PAGLIA (shrugging): No, it's true. I mean, I'm a butch bottom. Susie
[Bright] was right.

BENDERSON: Would you like to be tied up?

PAGLIA (emphatically): No, no. I wouldn't like, I don't think, the idea
of powerlessness —

BENDERSON: Would you like to have your nipples tortured?

PAGLIA (indignantly): No!

( Cut to vintage footage of voluptuous, raven-haired woman throwing knives at
a tiny, beatifically smiling girl, as a crowd of children watches. Cut to PAGLIA

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

and TREUT sitting on the museum floor. More agitated Italian gesticulation
by PAGLIAj

PAGLIA: Because I'm criticizing liberalism, people automatically call
me a conservative. This is madness! The idea that somehow one
cannot critique liberalism from the left, from the left wing of
liberalism. I mean, how can people be so stupid? How can they
be so naive? I am on record — I'm constantly on record in all
my interviews as well as in the book — as being pro-prostitution,
pro-pornography, pro-abortion, pro-legalization of drugs, pro-
homosexuality, pro-drag queens. Now, how is that nco-conser-
vativc? The people who are saying this are so idiotic! We are
dealing here with such simplistic minds. I mean, there's no point
in even listening to such people!

See, the value of my work is not just what I am saying but
rather that I am breaking up all these bunkered positions. Many
people are condemning themselves out of their own mouths. I'm
sort of like this race boat that goes zooming by, okay? And it's
as interesting in the wake of where I've been as what I'm doing
myself. That is, people everywhere, in university departments
or in downtown New York or in San Francisco, are getting
apparently into huge arguments about my work, and it's being
very, very useful. For example, you have people who've been
claiming to be cutting edge and avant-garde, people who are
interested in (contemptuously) Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. For
the first time, in their inability to deal with my ideas, inability
to even read my book accurately, they are being revealed in
their university departments as, in fact, completely stereotyped
thinkers. The impoverishment of their minds, the smallness of
their imaginations is slowly being revealed to others in their
immediate circles.

So, I'm a very powerful weapon, okay, being used not by the
right against the left but rather by people who are liberal thinkers
who have been enslaved by these poseurs, these racketeers, peo-
ple who are pretending to be liberal but who are in fact just
naive politically. I have been congratulated by women — people
rush up to me at the end of my lectures — women of my age,
women who are younger, who are so sick of being bullied by

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

247

these sanctimonious puritans who call themselves feminists. I'm
a feminist, but I am liberating current feminism from these false
feminists who have a death grip on it right now, who are anti-
porn and so on. I'm bringing, like Madonna, a sense of beauty
and pleasure and sensuality back into feminism. Because, you
know, feminism's main problem for the last twenty years has
been that it is incapable of appreciating art, okay? There is no
aesthetics in feminism. All there is, is a social agenda. Art is
made a servant to a prefab social agenda. So what I'm doing is
allowing feminism to take aesthetics into it, and also psychology.

(Cut back to PAGLIA and BENDERSON.J

PAGLIA: If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in
prison! (BENDERSON laughs uproariously.) In other words, I get
away with murder! I get away with- murder, okay? Because I
think that men are constantly being arrested and taken away
in paddy wagons for things that I'm doing in my mind, you
know? That's why I can understand the way men's minds work,
because the way I look at women is absolutely lascivious. It's
what feminists call "the male gaze." But obviously it's not "the
male gaze" because, honey, I am using it! I have been doing it
for many a decade.

BENDERSON: Oh, well, I don't know. Maybe you have a testosterone
imbalance.

PAGLIA (gravely): Yes, I think I do have a hormonal imbalance. I
surely do. But I'm hairless! You'd think I'd have a beard or a
mustache, but I don't!

BENDERSON: Well, perhaps you have an excess of both hormones.
Too much testosterone and too much estrogen.

PAGLIA: Yes, yes, this may be the case. I certainly feel at the mercy
of my hormones. It's, like, every week, it's something different
with me. Some weeks of the month I feel very female, others
very male. I feel I have a sex change every month. (BENDERSON
laughs loudly.) It's true! I feel it. Sometimes I desire a man, some-
times a woman, you know. It just goes back and forth. I mean,
it never is the same with me. Never for a minute.

248 VAMPS & TRAMPS

BEXDERSOX: Well, maybe you can chart it, and then you could be
at the right place at the right time.

PAGLIA (laughing): Oh, I'm enough for myself. I'm in love with
myself. It's the romance of the century!

( Cut to PAGLIA on 42nd Street scrutinizing movie posters of blonde porn stars.
Her finger trails languidly across their glossy breasts and buttocks. Cut to her
drifting into a neon-lit porn emporium and then to a video booth, where she
gleefully watches a pantingly explicit hardcore film. Cut to PAGLIA and TREUT
sitting on the museum floor.)

PAGLIA: Feminism does not realize — contemporary feminism — the
degree to which it has silenced dissenting women and men. It
does not realize. And so it's completely off in an ivory tower,
and it's shocked when it goes into the outside world and says,
"What, what? You don't agree with us? Then you must be a
backlash to us! Yes, you must be having a backlash to us because
of our success." When, in fact, feminism has to open its eyes and
realize that it's made not a dent in anything outside a small
group of white, upper-middle-class men. These are the only men
who have changed, okay? Now in the law office, a man can't
say to you, "Hey, babe! You got great tits!" That's the only
change that has been made. It's made not a dent in the outside
world. Construction workers don't listen, working-class men
don't listen. The entire world is unchanged by feminism.

So my feminism is calling for strong men, strong women. And
also we must take all of the aspects of sexuality into ourselves.
We can no longer say, "This is good sex." Anything that is not,
that is dark or violent or abusive or hot, or anything like
that . . . oh, that's "bad" sex! I mean, this is unbelievable,
what's going on. Contemporary feminism has simply relapsed
into the puritanism of seventeenth-century New England here.
It's appalling, okay? I'm simply bringing a world sophistication
to sexuality, and it's obvious by the enormous surge of popularity
of my book that people are listening because they are sick and
tired of being sermonized to by these women!

These women are absolutely (grimacing) . . . it's pathetic!
Young women are being trained to look at fashion magazines

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

249

and see nothing but . . . you know, like you'll see a beautiful
woman's face, and it'll be "decapitation," "mutilation," "am-
putation." It's loathsome what's going on, okay? So I don't care
what these women say. I mean, these women are losers. They're
gonna lose to me. My victory over them will come decade by
decade by decade, okay? Their punishment for maligning me now
is to see the triumph of my work. Ha! (Cut to PAGLIA looking
directly into camera and jabbing her finger at the audience.) Let them
suck raw eggs and eat my dust!

SEX WAR

A SHORT FILM BY LUCA BABIN1

LAUREN HUTTON and CAMILLE PAGLIA, in a black Gaultier corset dress,
seat themselves at opposite ends of a Renaissance banquet table crowded with
food, fruit, and wine goblets. Next to each of their chairs, a large TV screen
shows a live image of the other woman. Amid the forest of studio lights are
racks of votive church candles. Cameramen circle and roam throughout the film.
HUTTON and PAGLIA talk at top speed, constantly interrupting each other
in overlapping dialogue.

LAUREN HUTTON: Okay. One of the things that I knew very, very
clearly from the first time I was trying to get into boys' gangs
as a young preadolescent — because it seemed that boys and
woods were much more interesting with their houses that said,
"No Girls" than girls playing with dolls, so I always wanted to
be out with the boys because it looked like more fun to me. But
I always knew that they were very alien creatures, and quite
dangerous. You could feel it, you know? It was like being around
with like a really bad alligator snapper, which is something that
could take you off a hand, down where I grew up.

[Excerpted. Directed by Luca Babini. Allied Species, Inc. and Trouble-
maker's Film, Inc. Filmed in New York on February 1, 1992.]

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 251

GAMILLE PAGLIA (laughing): Right!

HUTTON: And because early feminists were so frightened that they
weren't as smart as men — because we were taught that — it
seems like now they've taught young women to think that in
fact men are not different and they're not dangerous. I believe
that they're outright savages! (PAGLIA laughs.) That men are
savages and that our business is to civilize them.

PAGLIA: I agree with that.

HUTTON: And in a good way, not an emasculating way, which sucks.
But in a decent way. So you said that, um, what'd you say? You
said that we must have a common-sense attitude toward rape.
You have twelve tequilas at a fraternity party and go up to a
guy's room, and you're surprised when he assaults you.

PAGLIA: Yeah. That's right.

HUTTON: And girls right and left, over and over and over you see
them, going up to somebody's room in the dead of the night
and not understanding that men are not the same as us in sex.
And that's what's exciting. Male lust.

PAGLIA: Right. That's what's exciting.

HUTTON: That's what I fantasize about.

PAGLIA: That's what I think is wrong in the feminist rhetoric right
now, because I think we don't want to curtail or to castrate —

HUTTON: Yikes! No!

PAGLIA: — male sexuality.

HUTTON: That's what's interesting.

PAGLIA: Yes, that's what's interesting. I think it's for the good of
the species. You want to keep men hot, okay? All right?

HUTTON (laughing): Keep 'em hot, absolutely!

PAGLIA: So my motto for men is going to be this, "Get it up!" That's
my thing. "Get it up!" And now my motto for women: "Deal
with it."

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OFFSCREEN MALE VOICE: Say that again? (HUTTON laughs.)

PAGLIA: I'm saying for men, get it up and keep it up. Get it up!
And I'm saying for women, deal with it. Deal with it! Not cut it
off, not like, you know (imitates panicky spinster), "No, no, no,
no!" Not lecturing to men, okay? It's up to women to realize
that there's this dangerous force —

HUTTON: I think I like this.

PAGLIA: — in male sexuality, in the force of nature, and again, it's
for the good of the species.

( Cut to new segment.)

HUTTON: I think rape is up. You say no, right?
PAGLIA: No, absolutely not. I mean, I feel that the frequency —
HUTTON: Have you seen statistics on this, or are you just —
PAGLIA: The frequency of reporting is definitely up, okay?
HUTTON: Yes. But why wouldn't rape itself be up, since girls go —
PAGLIA: It isn't up.

HUTTON: I mean, in the Fifties, boy, you did not go to a guy's room
who was, like, much bigger than you. And never with a guy you
had just met, and you had ten tequilas, and in fact unless you
were looking to be — you know —

PAGLIA: In point of fact, I knew many examples. I mean, I knew
examples in high school and in college of girls who had been
raped who wouldn't dream of reporting it. As a matter of fact,
as the years have gone on, I have known fewer and fewer women
who are raped, all right? I think it's probably going down because
women are more together. I think that women, in general, are
wiser. There are a lot of stupid women who are out there who
become these date-rape heroines. They make me so sick. They
get on TV, they're on the cover of People magazine, all right?

These stupid girls on the cover of People magazine, whenever
it was. The girl, you know, at Colgate University. There's an
advertisement: oh, yes, "Come and spend the weekend at the

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

253

fraternity house, we guarantee your safety." Now, what kind of
dope do you have to be to spend a weekend at a fraternity house
and think your safety's guaranteed? And she gets drunk. Oh,
her grandmother had died recently. So she gets drunk.

HUTTON: Young male lust. Hmm.

PAGLIA: And at something like three in the morning — after she drank
too much — three men come into the room, and she's surprised?
And now she's a heroine on the cover of People? These are stupid
girls, stupid women!

HUTTON: Well, maybe in fact they're victims of this sort of early
feminist idea that men and women are the same —

PAGLIA: That's absolutely it.

HUTTON: — that we have the same brain, and the girl thinks, "Well,
I'm not gonna jump a guy and throw him on his back and
absolutely out-and-out rape him." Although there were, there
were three women in Kansas City that raped that guy. Did you
ever see that?

PAGLIA: No, I didn't.

HUTTON: It was fabulous! They raped him and threatened him with
a hammer. He reported them. (PAGLIA laughs.) And the cops
made a lot of fun of him in Kansas City, I think.

PAGLIA: Now see, I look at movies. There's so many movies that
show the delirium of gang rape and how men can goad each
other into a gang rape and abuse a woman and not realize that
she's a person, okay? How many movies do you have to see like
Death Wish? Or Where the Boys Are. I mean, there are so many
of these movies. How dumb can you be? See, what women don't
understand is that it's possible for men to have sex with an inert
object, okay?

HUTTON: A watermelon, perhaps. Or anything, yeah.

PAGLIA: Well, even a watermelon! But I think even a drunk woman,
a woman who's comatose.

254

VAMPS & TRAMPS

HUTTON: Yeah. Inert objects, yeah.

PAGLIA: Women can't imagine that, okay? That actually men could
enjoy having sex, group sex, with a drunk and, you know,
passed-out girl. I can understand it. From my male brain, what-
ever it is. I think I have the brain of a rapist. Actually, that's
the truth, okay?

HUTTON: Can you speak into the mike? (Laughs) You have the brain
of a male rapist?

PAGLIA: I can understand rape, okay? As a woman who's been very
frustrated by other women's attitudes toward me, I can absolutely
understand it. I totally understand it.

HUTTON: And what is it? Let's get it down here. Is it an idea of
naked dominance?

PAGLIA: No. What it is is that women have something you want. You
wanna get in there. They seem to be like citadels, all right?

HUTTON: Citadels.

PAGLIA: And they close the door against you, and you have this rage,
and you want to get in there, okay, and also you have this sense
of honor which women don't understand. A sense of pride. And
what I have had happen to me, okay, where girls and women
have said to me, "You think I'm leading you on?" And when
in fact, her behavior had been, like for forty-eight hours, out-
rageously leading on! Outrageously provocative! I think half the
time women don't know what they're doing, okay?

HUTTON: Or we're taught to relate almost only sexually quite often,
you know, with daddies first and then —

PAGLIA: But I believe there's a kind of autoerotic quality to women's
sexuality and that men are aroused by it. That it is the vibrations
or the signals being sent out, okay? And that women do not
understand the signals they're sending out. They do not under-
stand the inflammatory nature of those signals. And that I, as
a lesbian or as a bisexual woman, absolutely understand it, okay?
I understand the lust that men have for women, the rage that

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255

men have toward women. And the way it can turn into rape.
And the only reason I think I have never raped anyone is because
I'm a woman. I can't possibly, you know? I can't take any sat-
isfaction, physical satisfaction, in an inert object. I could not
do it.

HUTTON: Well, it's probably more interesting in fantasy than the
actual thing, too.

PAGLIA: No, I don't believe that's true.

HUTTON: You've never found that out?

paglia: No.

HUTTON: You've never experienced that? Where something that was
erotic in a fantasy, when it was actually carried through was
sort of . . . well, squeamy?

PAGLIA: In studying the images of rape in literature and art, and
also the fantasies of rape, I feel that —

HUTTON: It's sort of heroic in a way.

PAGLIA: — I feel I understand it. And that the feminist discourse on
rape is totally wrong and it's putting women in danger, okay?
They do not —

HUTTON: Yes, I agree with that, absolutely!

PAGLIA: They do not understand, okay? They do not understand
what lust is, from the male point of view.

HUTTON: Or the glory of male lust.

PAGLIA: The glory of male lust, yeah.

HUTTON: Or, in fact, how interested we are in it.

PAGLIA: Yeah. I want to fan the flames of lust —

HUTTON (thoughtfully): Fan the flames . . .

PAGLIA: Fan the flames of lust, that's my aim.

HUTTON: Good. Deal with it.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGL1A: Deal with it. (HUTTON laughs.) All right. Get it up and deal
with it. Right.

HUTTON: Okay. Male lust and the rock and roll strut!

PAGLIA: Right.

HUTTON: OK, so why are there no female —

PAGLIA: Well, I think that rock and roll is basically male lust, right
at its peak, okay? Because it's a teenage male activity. And I
as a great rock fan — and I've been listening to it for thirty-five
years — I have to remark on the fact that there are no great
women lead guitarists in the world, okay? Anyone who knows
about rock has to admit this. I mean, it's not that women don't
have access. That's bullshit. They now have access to guitars, they
now have all-women bands. They have hi years, right? Not one
great woman [hard rock] solo has been done —

HUTTON: Why?

PAGLIA: — in the twenty-five years of rock. Because I believe it's all
about lust. It's all about aggression, male aggression, all right?
That kick-ass, you know, knock-the-door down, in-your-face
thing.

HUTTON: Oooh!

PAGLIA: Yeah. It's male. You see? And I've got that. That's what
I'm doing in my book. That's the sound in my book. (Smacks
her fist into her hand.) That high-impact sound. That is the sound
of the guitars, all right? Now, I'm doing it in words —

HUTTON: You've never met a guy who's tougher than you?

PAGLIA (long pause): Uh . . .

HUTTON: And smart at the same time?

PAGLIA: Oh, no, no, not smart. But there are men who are. When
I'm in the presence of real male dominance, I can feel it. I can
feel it, and I enjoy it. It's rare, but it's there, okay? But who
could get along with me, you know? You see, my grandmother
said —

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 257

HUTTON: What do you mean, "no"?

PAGLIA: My grandmother said to me in Italian —

HUTTON: "No," what?

PAGLIA: My grandmother said, "If you were married, your husband
would either beat you or kill you!" Okay?

HUTTON: Oooh. So granny scared you. That's scary.

PAGLIA: No, she didn't scare me.

HUTTON: So then you wouldn't mind being beaten?

PAGLIA: No, no! She was saying that I'm such an obnoxious per-
sonality that it would be almost impossible to have like a cou-
ple —

HUTTON: I don't think you're obnoxious. You're pretty ridiculous
on your — Never mind! (Laughs.)

PAGLIA: But to live with it on a day-to-day level — it's nice to visit,
but to live with it? I mean, you know, this is a vacation. This
is recreation. Can you imagine day after day after day?

HUTTON: Oh, I bet you'd calm down.

PAGLIA: Oh, please!

( Cut to new segment.)

I PAGLIA: See, my theory is that in the last hundred years we've seen
a collapse of the great extended families, the tribal extended
family — the tribal family would be what you saw in Africa —
into this nuclear family.

HUTTON: Very dangerous. Very dangerous.

PAGLIA: And maybe that the nuclear unit perhaps is an artificial
and oppressive construction —

I HUTTON: Absolutely.

PAGLIA: — and is like a pressure cooker of incestuous feeling.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

MUTTON: Yeah. Yeah. Good thinking! So you're saying that it's
absolutely out-and-out breeding and there's no outlet for it.
Because you don't have aunts and uncles and grandparents and
neighbors sitting around saying, "Oh, Dad's completely nuts
today, watch out!" or "Mother's riding the rag and she's doing
this and that." Kids think that the parents are in fact the entire
world.

PAGLIA: Right. Right. That's exactly it, and they have no wise elders
to help them, okay? And you have this awful — It's like a prison!
It's leading to anorexia.

HUTTON: Yeah, absolutely.

PAGLIA: Anorexia to me is one of these disturbances when the daugh-
ter tries to stop her sexual maturation. It's because she's re-
sponding, I think, to the incestuous currents going on in the
nuclear family.

HUTTON: Yeah. It serves a point.

PAGLIA: I think that homosexuality is also coming from this. That
is, if you have no other form of relatedness, these two parents
alone cannot possibly help you to understand the world. You
need the entire tribe to help you understand the world. You need
rites de passage. And the schools have failed, the Church has failed,
and so on. The kids' culture is TV, it's popular culture.

HUTTON: We're a society in deep chaos, no? Deep shit!

PAGLIA: We're in a period of sexual crisis, absolutely. I don't think
that feminism's helping right now.

HUTTON: No.

PAGLIA: I think feminism's obstructing and forcing —

HUTTON: No. It's making bigger enemies of us than we were.

PAGLIA: It's making bigger enemies of the sexes.

HUTTON: And it's making young girls unsafe because they don't
understand that they're dealing with a very potent savage and
spectacular animal. Men.

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259

PAGLIA: It's also alienating women from their own bodies —
hutton: Yes. Yeah.

PAGLIA: — because they don't understand that in their bodies they
have something which men want, okay. So they're encouraged
to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and
negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this
flame. They have a flame, and it's enormously powerful, all
right? For example, Francesca Stanfill, who interviewed me for
the New York cover story a year ago — she's a novelist, she has
two children, she went to Yale and so forth — she said nothing in
her Yale education prepared her for being a mother.

HUTTON: Right. Yeah.

PAGLIA: That's very interesting. Nothing helps a woman to under-
stand what she is as a natural being.

HUTTON: That's it.

PAGLIA: Nothing in our culture will help.
( Cut to new segment.)

PAGLIA: I think the problem with our culture is that we seem to be
living in an urban technological society in which we are in, you
know, air-conditioned offices with sealed-in windows, working
with machines all day long. We're forced to be very limited
Apollonian personalities in the day. Therefore it's all the more
important that, at night, we go back to recover the Dionysian
other self which has been repressed.

HUTTON: Amen.

PAGLIA: For that, we need more lust, not less lust! Feminism is totally
out of sync with what is needed now, OK? We want more por-
nography, better pornography. Pornography everywhere! Not in
the office, necessarily —

HUTTON: Have you tried writing some pornography?

PAGLIA: I did! I mean, my book.

260 VAMPS & TRAMPS

HUTTON: Women write pretty good pornography.

paglia: My book is the most X-rated academic book probably ever
written.

HUTTON: Mmm. Right.

paglia: Ha! A hundred nuns with dildos? That was Harold Bloom's
favorite line in that book.

HUTTON (laughing): Oooh — I missed that part.

PAGLIA: Yeah, well, that's the Marquis de Sade chapter. The orgy
in the convent.

HUTTON: I don't know if that's so incredibly attractive. A hundred
nuns and — Oh! I'd be running.

PAGLIA: The Marquis de Sade wrote that scene.

HUTTON: Why do you like him so much? Well, never mind. I don't
even want to talk about why you like him. Tell me about this.
You said that male culture created western technological tra-
dition that gave you —

PAGLIA: Western technological tradition created the modern, capi-
talistic life that has allowed the emergence of the feminist. Our
feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent
on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the
back porch on a washboard! My ability to write this book came
from this society which men have created. No other culture has
produced feminism but ours. The idea that western culture is
evil — !

HUTTON: Men. Great men. So how do we tamp down this sort of
war that's going on here? First, women need to be sort of secure.
You said that on some level men understand that women are —

PAGLIA: Dominant! Woman is the dominant sex.

HUTTON: Yeah. But yet we believed our grandmothers' stories that,
in fact, men are dominant. So we bought our own conspiracy.

PAGLIA: Men are dominant in society, okay? And it is the mission
of feminism to seek the full political and legal equality of women.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

261

We must win the entrance of women into the social realm. What
I'm saying in my work is that we are much bigger than merely
social selves. That there's a social sphere of life, but there is also
a sexual or emotional sphere that overlaps the social sphere but
is not identical to it. So I'm saying that, in the sexual and
emotional sphere, woman is dominant and men know it on some
deep level. They remember having emerged from this huge,
matriarchal, goddesslike, shadowy figure from which they strug-
gled for identity. Yes. They were inside the woman's body for
nine months, and they struggled for identity out away from
her — in the early years of life in which the woman is completely,
you know, overmastering them.

HUTTON: So how do we do that? How do we in fact deal with it?

PAGLIA: Well, I'm saying we must accept sexual difference and
understand what is going on. What is going on is sex war, and all
the things that are going on — the turbulence between the
sexes — may be a permanent condition. We must seek for under-
standing.

HUTTON: Well, to some degree it would keep things interesting,
right? So you need that sort of flame.

PAGLIA: To keep it interesting. But we shouldn't be blaming men.

* * *

PAGLIA: Nature has a plot, a plan for women to reproduce, all right?
And then if you don't want to reproduce . . . like I have abso-
lutely no interest in having children. And I have been at total
war with my body —

HUTTON: Amen.

PAGLIA: — for thirty years.

HUTTON: Do they sneak up on you? Dreams? Do you suddenly
dream that some witch is throwing a baby and you've got it
caught in your arms and you've got to like take care of it? And
the witch is gone —

262 VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGL1A: Is this a dream that you have?

HUTTON: You bet. (PAGLIA laughs.) I have all versions of that. Or
I had them. Fortunately the eggs are gone.

PAG LI A (laughing): You have baby-throwing dreams?

HUTTON: Yes, absolutely, at different times. You haven't hit them
yet? You should have hit them.

PAGLIA: No, I don't have baby dreams.

HUTTON: What? How do you have them?

PAGLIA: I have nature dreams. I have big nature dreams.

HUTTON: You never actually ... It doesn't actually spring out? The
idea —

PAGLIA: Uh uh.

HUTTON: — of having a baby doesn't come undisguised into your
dreams?

PAGLIA: That would be a terrible nightmare to me. I think that's a
waking nightmare to me. I — I — It has never happened in my
dreams.

HUTTON: It's a nightmare for me, too.
PAGLIA: Yeah, yeah.

HUTTON: I mean, I actually raised some babies, so I know what a
nightmare it is!

PAGLIA: You raised babies?

HUTTON: My mother's, yeah. It's a very hard and big deal.

PAGLIA: Oh, all right. No, it would be a horror to me. But I have
big dreams. Big nature dreams. Like about fire, flood, you know,
that sort of thing. Storms. That's my cup of tea.

HUTTON: Mmm hmm.

PAGLIA: But you have dreams where babies are flung at you, and
they —

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

263

HUTTON: I did. I don't have them anymore. I don't have them
anymore because I'm almost out of eggs.

PAGLIA: How many babies are being flung at you at any given time?

HUTTON: Only one at a whack. (Laughs) Thank God.

PAGLIA: Oh, one at a whack? All right. (They laugh.)

( Cut to new segment.)

HUTTON: — but I don't think they [feminists] like men. Everybody
used to say to me, was I a feminist? I mean, I had decided at
thirteen that I would never, ever be supported by a man, because
I'd seen, you know, my mother and many other women in deep
trouble because of that. And I never have been. So in that sense,
that's feminist. And I certainly believe that everybody should
have the same money for the job. But it seemed that they didn't
like men. And as angry as I was and became at men, I certainly
felt they were the job. I mean, they are it. That's what we've
got. It's men. They're the most interesting game.

PAGLIA: Anyway, what women conceal from men, you know, is the
degree of men's dependency on women. I think that part of the
maternal love that a woman has for a —

HUTTON: Say it again. I'm sorry. Women conceal from men —

PAGLIA: Women conceal from men the degree of men's dependency
on them. I began to see it's a game being played.

HUTTON: Ah! So it's like pushing the young — the son — out.

PAGLIA: It's an actual game being played, okay, by women. Because
I began to see that the heterosexual love that a woman has for
her husband is in fact maternal. And that's what I lacked. That's
what I lacked. I lacked maternal feeling.

HUTTON: It's not all maternal.

PAGLIA: No, but I had lust for men, but I don't have the maternal
feeling for men. I mean, I don't want to stroke men —

HUTTON: They'll stroke you back, you know.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: No, you know what I mean — psychologically. I began to
see that men had these, like, spasms of ego, okay? And then it's
followed by relapses. And that women are constantly in this kind
of medical relationship and nursing relationship to men. I began
to see that the most successful heterosexual women that I knew
were in fact nursing.

HUTTON (laughing): Nurses.

PAGLIA: It's nursing. And it's a version of the maternal function, all
right? And I began to see there's a kind of soothing, stroking
thing that the successful heterosexual woman has — and that
men are not necessarily looking for tits and ass, okay, in the
long run. They're looking for nursing.

HUTTON (pondering): Looking for nursing.

PAGLIA: Yes.

HUTTON: You don't think that men ever get past that stage?
PAGLIA: No. They sink further and further.

HUTTON: I've decided that I'll go to my grave alone, if I can't find
a man that will accept me not as a mother or daughter and that
I don't have to be a mother or a daughter to. I mean, once in
a while we all relapse into those roles, because that's who we
are and that's a nice thing to do every once in a while. But there
must be a way of — There must be a place where it's an equal
cross.

paglia: Alas!

HUTTON: Or is that where you're talking? Alas?

PAGLIA: Alas! I think that in late life it's even more obvious that the
woman takes over the relationship. I see it all the time in the
shopping malls — ( Offstage laughter from the crew.)

HUTTON (big laugh, as she slaps the table with both hands): Oh, stop!
We're not living our lives in shopping malls!

PAGLIA: The woman is dragging the guy around, and he wants a
hot dog: "You can't have that!"

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

265

HUTTON: Those are people who probably never, ever became alive.
I call them "the undead." They're like people who just go from,
you know, their parents having sucked all the life out of them
when they were children to them pumping out children, so they
can suck the life out of them. That's the only life there ever is.
In fact, they're people who never had ideals, gave up what ideals
they had and have been old from birth. You know, going through
school, more than half your class was old, right? They were old
kids. I'm younger than most of the twenty-year-olds I know.

PAGLIA: This is true. Right.

HUTTON: That's why I'm not particularly worried about age.

PAGLIA: Hormonally, suddenly women's estrogen — women's female
hormones begin to lapse, and therefore their male hormone
becomes more powerful. At midlife, men's male hormones begin
to lapse, all right? So the woman becomes more powerful in later
life. That is the men's fate. Men have a brief moment of power,
okay, when their hormone is at its height in their late teenage
years and in their twenties. That's it, okay? That's it!

HUTTON (laughing): Camille! Get back! Get down!

PAGLIA: I'm saying that men go from control by their mothers to
control by their wives, and that is the horror of men's life. And
that feminism refuses to see this.

HUTTON: So this is why you say that young or any gay male is a
heroic symbol and free.

PAGLIA: Yes! Gay men are heroes to me!

HUTTON: Because they stand against this bullshit.

PAGLIA: Because they stand against control by women.

HUTTON: Yes, yes.

PAGLIA: And they alone are preserving the masculine impulse today.
Feminism is doing everything it can to destroy masculinity.

HUTTON: So you don't believe in love.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: Oh, I do believe in love.

HUTTON: I mean, maybe none of us sort of think it's possible, but it
must be. Don't you think? Heterosexual love? Must be.

PAGLIA: I believe in love. Love's an illusion, I think. I think there's
sexual passion under the surface of it, and then there's a nesting
instinct. I think that women really do nest.

HUTTON: Yes, but we're different.

PAGLIA: And that men shrink.

HUTTON: We can learn from them and they can learn from us —
PAGLIA: The husbands shrink.

HUTTON: — so why shouldn't, as we go on in life and learn more
and more, why shouldn't we in fact be able to be alongside
someone who's showing us a different view of what it is?

PAGLIA: Well, you have a wish of what would be good about life. I
am just trying to, as an objective observer, record —

HUTTON: Well, I don't go in shopping malls hardly ever! I stay out.
I go in them, I go nuts!

PAGLIA (laughing): The shopping mall is the center of American cul-
ture! — as Martha Stewart knows.

( Cut to new segment.)

HUTTON: The state of the sex wars, okay? The sex war is heating
up. You said you think that in fact sex is getting less interesting.
And do you think this is because women — because we decided
that we have the same brains? So people don't allow for this
sort of different —

PAGLIA: Well, I think that feminism's gotten very shrewish, all right?

HUTTON: Shrewish.

PAGLIA: And there's a lot of lecturing and sermonizing about sex
today. All these rules. And that you should behave in this way
and that way and there's only one kind of pornography or erotica

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

267

and you should not be pornographic, et cetera, et cetera, and
don't do things that are demeaning to woman. And I feel there's
been a terrible backsliding from the Sixties, when there really
was a kind of liberated sexual imagination. There were porno
books that were, like, very high-class porn books done often
under a nom de plume by well-known writers. There were sex
magazines. There was a kind of feeling of experimentation, fun,
and so on, vivacity, that's completely gone.

HUTTON: Yeah.

PAGLIA: And I think we have an overpoliticized sexual realm right
now, where even the alternative press — The Village Voice, Mother
Jones — is taking the most reactionary political positions about
what's tolerable in sex.

HUTTON: It seems to me it goes back to the Sixties when we thought
this whole new world was going to come when we were young.
And we thought we were taking over. We were going to come
up with love and honor and political ... to bring America back
to America being what it was supposed to be.

PAGLIA: Paradise now.

HUTTON: Paradise now.

PAGLIA: Right.

HUTTON: I remember I was on my way to Berkeley. Because bas-
ically I became politicized when I saw — for me, the Sixties
started, the Sixties opened for me when I picked up a newspaper
and on the front page — this was in Tampa, Florida; usually we
had kittens on the front page — suddenly, on the front page was
a girl who was, you know, approximately my age. She had long
black hair, still left over from beatnik fashion, long black stock-
ings, dirndl skirt, I think. She was being dragged by her hair
down a bunch of steps. She had long black hair, she was on her
back, and it was a long shot of a very large, fat cop trudging
down the thing with all his equipment and dragging this girl,
my age, down the steps on her back. And I thought, "In America?
Are they out of their mind?" And it was the beginning of the

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Free Speech Movement. And she was being dragged down be-
cause a bunch of kids had gotten together on the steps and said
they were gonna stand there and talk until, you know, they got
freedom of speech and freedom of — what's it called?

PAGLIA: Assembly.

HUTTON: Yes. Freedom of assembly. So I immediately packed up
and got ready to go to Berkeley and then got, uh, snafued and
waylaid in New Orleans. Couldn't, couldn't, couldn't make it.
But in fact the D.A. who ordered that — that pulling kids, girls,
eighteen, by their hair down the steps — was Edwin Meese.

PAGLIA: Whoa!

HUTTON: He was from Oakland, and he was the youngest D.A. in
history. He ordered that. He then became the brains for — brain
for — Reagan. I mean, he was the Reagan brains, since that was
a totally empty skull there. And all our heroes, in fact, were
silenced or shot. And kids now — I mean, we had a lot of heroes.
When we were kids, when we were in our early twenties, in our
late teens, we had a lot of heroes. We had both Kennedys, who
in fact were heroes at the time. We had Malcolm X, we had
Martin Luther King, we had Margaret Mead. She came out
and said, "I tried some grass. I liked it. It's pretty nice." (Laughs)
We had lots of them.

PAGLIA: Well, she didn't get shot! (Laughs.)

HUTTON (laughing): No, she didn't get shot, but we haven't heard
from her lately! It seems to be a very sad time with no heroes
and no one in our generation speaking up, because in fact —

PAGLIA: We have to acknowledge, though, that what happened was
that our generation was guilty of excesses and of impatience and
lack of practicality in presenting a program of practical —

HUTTON: Yeah. They didn't know what they were doing or where
they were going.

PAGLIA: They didn't know — right. It's sort of like, "Let's levitate
the Pentagon."

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

269

HUTTON: Yeah. And they were throwing bombs like assholes without
even knowing for what.

PAGLIA: But the conservative reaction of the Seventies and Eighties
has got to be understood. Our generation made many funda-
mental errors of strategy and judgment that led to that reaction,
okay? The idea that all of our problems today are because of
the conservatives — no,

HUTTON: Mmm.

PAGLIA: Our problems are because we rebelled but we had no program
to put in the place of that particular structure. And so, once there
were the days of rage and riots in the street, People's Park, okay,
which was just a —

HUTTON: I remember People's Park.

PAGLIA: — a kind of childish, you know, running around playing
games.

HUTTON: Well, they were kids. So how could you have a plan when
you're twenty years old and you haven't lived or seen anything
or done anything?

PAGLIA: That wonderful film Berkeley in the Sixties shows documentary
film footage — shows the way in the beginning you had these
often Jewish, very passionate social activists involved in civil
rights at Berkeley. And the way it changed and altered, okay,
this film shows. People talk about it — like one of the people in
it, the professors in it say the minute it got out that Berkeley
was the place to be, suddenly you began to get every lunatic in
the country going there —

hutton: It was coopted.

PAGLIA: — and then you begin having the psychedelic drugs, okay?
It suddenly became a psychedelic scene. And the minute it got
into drugs, people lost the ability to see social reality for what
it is, all right? And, you see, those early Jewish activists were
very practical — they were grounded in the study of economics,
their parents were refugees of the Holocaust, and so on.

270 VAMPS & TRAMPS

HUTTON: They were also the same people that asked for the lifting
of all codes and rules and regulations on colleges, right?

PAGLIA: Mmm hmm.

HUTTON: So that now you can graduate from Princeton and get
absolutely no classical history, no math. I mean, you know,
basket-weaving.

PAGLIA: Right.

( Cut to new segment.)

HUTTON: I think probably the reason men arc so bad to each other
is that we are in fact not protective of something in there that
we tolerate between women.

PAGLIA: I don't think any of us are fully civilized beings. You see, I
think that there's a barbaric undertow to all of human life and
it's out there. It's like the passion of sex and aggression is always
ready to break into open sight.

HUTTON: Right.

PAGLIA: And I think that's what crime is. Crime is basically a kind
of regression. You know, in terms of, like, serial murderers —
we've talked a little bit about this. I mean, I think that there
are different parts of the brain and one is the reptilian brain,
the part that's the most —

HUTTON: Back.

PAGLIA: — primitive.

HUTTON: Back brain.

PAGLIA: And that these are the impulses, amoral impulses toward
sex and aggression.

HUTTON: So is that original sin? Our back brain?

PAGLIA: Yeah.

HUTTON: Our reptilian brain?

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

2 "7 1

PAGLIA: Yes. Yes, I think it is. It's like a serpent. It's the serpent
within us. And it's there in all of us. I don't think we're born
good. See, feminism believes, with Rousseau, that we're born
good and that bad social signals turn us bad.

HUTTON: Mmm.

PAGLIA: Like pornography makes men rape. This is ridiculous!
HUTTON: Yeah.

PAGLIA: What I'm saying's the opposite. I'm saying, like the Catholic
thing, we're born bad. We're born with an impulse toward —

HUTTON: We're born animals.

PAGLIA: We're born animals.

HUTTON: And hopefully we grow up.

PAGLIA: And rules civilize us. Society civilizes us. Society is women's
protection against rape. It trains men not to rape, all right? And
I mean, all throughout history, rape has been condemned. The
idea that feminism discovered rape is absurd, okay? Ethical men
throughout history have been on the record about this — that
rape is a form of brutishness that has never been tolerated in
any civilized community. And so the date-rape thing — this is
out of control. I have to explain to foreign reporters the date-
rape thing. They never can understand it. They say, "What is
this?" When I enunciate common-sense principles of female
behavior, I'm abused. I'm called "anti-women" and "pro-
rape." I mean, it's insane what's going on now! Again, it's the
feminist attempt to gain control of sex by politicizing it and
hammering it to death with dead rhetoric. Yes. It's jargon!

HUTTON: You're talking about European people coming and asking
you this, right? They've had time to grow an aristocracy. We
haven't had that. We changed every single generation.

PAGLIA: Well, they have a more sophisticated view of sex. What's
permitted on Italian or on British TV in terms of sex is extraor-
dinarily more adult and mature than what we are permitted

272 VAMPS & TRAMPS

here. And everyone knows that we are allowed more violence
than the British or —

HUTTON: Ooh! Tell me about the breasts of — who? You said I get
to pick a saint's name since I became a Catholic.

paglia: Oh, Saint Agatha.

HUTTON: Saint Agatha.

PAGLIA: Saint Agatha had her breasts cut oflfand served on a platter,
apparently, or at least exhibited on a platter. And so when it
comes time for your confirmation, since you're going to be an
honorary Catholic, you must pick a saint's name.

HUTTON: There's an Italian bonbon, you said, that's shaped like
Saint Agatha's breast?

PAGLIA: Yes, apparently an Italian bonbon of white chocolate, I
think it is —

HUTTON: White chocolate.

PAGLIA: — yes, that's shaped with a little nipple —
HUTTON: A cherry stem nipple?

PAGLIA: — with a little nipple in white chocolate, I think. I'm not
sure. I have never had one, so I can't really give any firsthand
account. ("HUTTON laughs.) But there's Saint Agatha. That's a
very colorful saint to be, you know.

HUTTON (smacks her forehead and laughs): These Eye-talians. I tell ya!

PAGLIA: Yeah. Well, we have an instinct for sex and violence. That's
what I'm saying in my book, that in Italian culture you see a
residue of the ancient pagan past. And that's why I have such
a bizarre mentality. Because of being Italian.

* * *

HUTTON: I think you can't have just male, you can't havejust hunter
intelligence, and you can't havejust caretaking intelligence. Like
you say, we'd still be in grass huts!

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

273

paglia: Mmm hmm.

HUTTON: But if you'd just have men, they're going to be burning
down the grass huts. Which is what they're doing now.

PAGLIA: Yeah, unfortunately, this has been the evidence through
history, okay? But my theory is that one day people from outer
space will appear ("HUTTON laughs) and that suddenly the entire
human race will see that it has more alike, more in common
than with these, these jelly-like creatures with, like, one eye in
the middle of their forehead. This is what / believe will unify
the world eventually. But it may take a long time.

HUTTON (smiling, looks at watch and up at sky): What time is it? Getting
late!

PAGLIA: Yeah, yeah. But actually, you know, again as someone who
has studied history (Director Luca Babini is seen here at PAGLIA^
side, as he aims his camera at HUTTONJ, I have to tell you I don't
have this gloomy view of the contemporary world that many
others do right now. I just do not because I have seen what the
past has been like, where you have banditry and war and star-
vation and so on.

HUTTON: Yeah, no. God knows a lot of things are a lot better.

PAGLIA: The condition of the world is certainly not at all — I don't
see any decline. People who are always wringing their hands
about the way we're going and how we're living in the most
corrupt . . . they have no knowledge at all of the corruption of
the past and the venality of the past. For example, to appreciate
America you have to go, let's say, to Italy. Like my father was
thinking of retiring to Italy because we're Italian, and the dif-
ficulties over there that he had merely even making a phone call
(HUTTON laughs) so enraged him that he realized what an Amer-
ican he is and how we don't even realize the conveniences and
pleasures of America, the efficiency of America, because we take
them for granted.

274 VAMPS & TRAMPS

HUTTON: I had a great time. Thanks.

PAGLIA: Goodbye. Goodbye, George! Goodbye, Gracie! (They laugh.)

(As credits roll, cut to HUTTON applying lipstick brush to a squirming,
protesting PAGLIA in the makeup session preceding the filming. Gabriele
Vigorelli had just done PAGLIA 'j hair.)

HUTTON: Calm down! Nice, full sensuous Italian lips!

PAGLIA: You're giving me bigger lips than I have!

HUTTON: These are nice Italian lips.

PAGLIA: Well, these lips are too big —

HUTTON: Calm down. Think of Rita Hayworth.

PAGLIA: Rita Hayworth had her —

HUTTON: Sshhh! (They laugh.)

2 & 3. Stills from Sex War. Lauren Hutton (above) and Camille
Paglia (below). Hutton in mirror (right) and on monitor (left),
being filmed by Luca Babini (rear center).
Photos: Allied Species, Inc.

4 & 5. The filming of Glennda and Camille Do Downtown. Glennda
Orgasm and Paglia crossing Sixth Avenue (top) and in front of
Stonewall Inn (bottom). Photos: Tracey Tippet.

GLENNDA AND CAMILLE DO
DOWNTOWN

A sunny spring Saturday in New York's Washington Square Park. As rock
music blares on the soundtrack, GLENNDA ORGASM, CAMILLE PAGLIA,
and her two leather-clad bodyguards, the CENTURIONS, stroll through the
crowds toward the fountain. GLENNDA is wearing dramatic Cleopatra makeup,
a blonde Sixties "flip" wig, and a gold ankle-length gown glittering with
sequins and ivory beads. PAGLIA is in blue jeans, black jacket, and a white
Keith Richards T-shirt trimmed with a dagger-pierced heart. Since GLENNDA
■ 6' 1" and PAGLIA 5' 3", the mismatched pair look like Mutt and Jeff.

GLENNDA ORGASM: Here is this week's very special guest: my fa-
vorite feminist scholar, Camille Paglia. Hi, Camille!

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Hi, Glennda. It's wonderful to be here.

GLENNDA: Isn't it nice? It's gorgeous weather.

PAGLIA (surveying the lounging New York University students): It's fabu-
lous. Very Sixties! Glennda, I want to introduce you to my

[Produced and directed by Glenn Belverio (Glennda Orgasm). Filmed in
New York City on May 15, 1993. Aired June 14 and 17 on Manhattan
Cable Public Access Television. A shortened version premiered at the 1994
Sundance Film Festival.]

277

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Centurions, my bodyguards. (Two brawny African- American men
wearing dark glasses and grave expressions loom into camera view.)
Rcnnard Snowdcn and Brian Roach. These are my men.

glennda: Hi!

RENNARD SNOWDKN (formally shaking GLENNDA \S hand): How are
you?

PAGLIA: They accompany me everywhere. They're very famous.
Their image has gone around the world.

(The stern, silent, unsmiling CENTURIONS flank PAGLIA, as GLENNDA
admires them.)

GLENNDA: Wow! They're beautiful!
PAGLIA: Aren't they gorgeous?
GLENNDA: They're great!
PAGLIA: They're my Egyptian warriors.
glennda: I feel safe. I feel much safer.

PAGLIA: / feel like a girl when I'm around them! Thank you, thank
you, guys! (The CENTURIONS return to their outlying positions.)

GLENNDA: Thank you! Okay. So Camille, what's the concept? What
are we doing today? What is this video?

PAGLIA: Well, we're here to trash, essentially, the feminist estab-
lishment, all right? And all anti-sex porn-phobes!

GLENNDA: Oh, it's getting so moralistic these days. I feel like I can't
make a move without someone beating down on me saying,
"You're being too sexy!"

PAGLIA: Oh, absolutely. No, it's absolutely horrible. Catharine
MacKinnon's everywhere, (looking around) We could see her at
any moment, popping out of a bush with Barbara Walters!
Really! This is an Anti-Andrea Dworkin Day, all right?

GLENNDA: Yes, a Dworkin-Free Zone! (They laugh.) What's the name
of the video, Camille?

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279

paglia: Well, we're calling this Glennda and Camille Do Downtown,
and we're imitating the famous Debbie Does Dallas.

( Cut to footage from the 1979 porn classic, Debbie Does Dallas. Cheerleaders
bob, and football players scamper. Debbie peels off her shirt and soaps her
breasts in the locker room.)

GLENNDA: Oh, wow, that's a great movie.

PAGLIA: Yes, it is. And, and of course, I love all early porn. I love
that period when women's bodies were lush and sensual and
untoned.

glennda: Right.

PAGLIA: So, um, lewder.

GLENNDA: It's a form of art, and people don't like to say that it's a
form of art.

PAGLIA: It is art. Pornography and art are identical for me, abso-
lutely.

GLENNDA: Absolutely. I agree.

PAGLIA: I think Michelangelo is a pornographer.

GLENNDA: Well, I think a day without pornography is like a day
without sunshine!

PAGLIA (laughing): I agree with you completely. The Pieta is to me
a piece of pornography.

GLENNDA: Absolutely. And Michelangelo was a pornographer.

PAGLIA: He was. And the Pope is a collector of porn.

GLENNDA: Wow! He's the biggest porn collector in the world!

PAGLIA: He is. The Vatican Museum —

GLENNDA: The Vatican!

PAGLIA: — is filled with nudes, you know?

GLENNDA: Wow! Wait 'til Gay Pleasures finds out about this!

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: I know. So, here we are in Washington Square Park, and
we just feel like it's the middle of —

GLENNDA: — the Sixties.

PAGLIA: The Sixties. Yeah, it's like your handbag. Show your hand-
bag, Glennda!

(The camera zooms in for a close-up of GLENNDA 's large, square faux-
leopardskin purse. PAGLIA fondles it appreciatively.)

GLENNDA: This is a very Sixties handbag.

PAGLIA: Is this fabulous?

GLENNDA: That was your generation, your generation of the Sixties.
PAGLIA: I am of the Sixties, that's right.

( Cut to news footage of stoned Sixties hippies moving and grooving at an outdoor
rock festival.)

PAGLIA: And so many of us, you know, blew our brains out on acid.
Not me!

GLENNDA: Oh. That's good.

PAGLIA: Because I'm addicted to my own hormones, Glennda.

GLENNDA: But how do you feel? You know, a lot of Sixties fashion
has come back into style, like Sixties and Seventies into the
Nineties. But do you think it's brought in the same kind of values,
or is it a more sanitized version of the Sixties and Seventies?

PAGLIA: Well, when anything returns, it's always ironic. It loses
some oomph. I mean that's a lesson of history. But essentially,
I do feel the kids of the Nineties have moved backward and are
looking to Sixties idealism again. It's such a change, and a
blessed one, from the kind of Rolex, you know, BMW, Seventies-
Eighties materialism. (GLENNDA groans.) I hated that period —
Michael Milken, the Wall Street crap. I hated that.

GLENNDA: White middle-class mechanisms.

PAGLIA: Yeah. So the Nineties are — it's the period of the drag queen.
Drag queens are the dominant sexual personae of this decade,
in my view.

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281

GLENNDA: Well, you know, Camille, there's been a lot of talk about
1993 being the "Year of the Drag Queen." How do you feel
about that?

PAGLIA: Oh, I think it's so true. And I have modeled so much of
my personality on drag queens. I mean, I learned how to be a
woman from drag queens. There's no doubt about it.

GLENNDA: Wow.

PAGLIA: I was not happy with my sex role. I was, you know, butch
for decades, and now I know how to put on a dress, Glennda.

GLENNDA: Absolutely. Well, you know, a lot of feminists accuse drag
queens of mocking women. Have you ever heard them say that?

PAGLIA: Oh, God! Oh, they're so naive. Please! Drag queens have
preserved the power of woman! I call my feminism "Drag Queen
Feminism."

GLENNDA: That's great.

paglia: See, because I feel that drag queens have a better, more
historical sense of sex roles than do feminists, all right? They
understand the power, the glamour, the glory of woman! I mean,
in putting on a dress, putting on high heels, you are fabulous! It
goes back to Babylon. It goes back to ancient Egypt. I'm so tired
of this kind of yuppie feminism, white bourgeois feminism with
the attache case. Oh! The kind of Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf
boring crap! That's so white bread — you know, white bread and
mayonnaise, that's all it is.

GLENNDA: Well, you know, what I like about drag is we have these
extremes. You can be ultra-butch, and then you can be ultra-
feminine. And I think sometimes feminism tries to push everyone
into the middle and say, "No, we have to whitewash everyone,"
and everyone has to be, like, kind of unsexy and androgynous.

PAGLIA: Yeah.

GLENNDA: Androgyny can be sexy. But I think they want a kind of
unsexy state of androgyny.

282

VAMPS 8c TRAMPS

PAGLIA: This is exactly right. Right now in the Ivy League, okay,
there's a lot of talk that the prominence of drag queens right
now is due to the new interest in androgyny, the dissolution of
sex roles. Now I think that's wrong. The drag queen flourishes
in periods when sex roles are actually very firm. Like the Fifties,
okay?

glennda: Right.

PAGLIA: That was a great period of drag. Drag went underground.
It fell apart in the Seventies and Eighties. So I'm saying that
the dominance of the drag queen now in the Nineties is due to
us looking again for what is it to be a man, what is it to be a
woman. And we're looking historically again. We no longer like
the kind of Mao suit, unisex look. That's tired! That's stale!
Androgyny is dead! Drag queen— ism is in!

( Cut to GLENNDA and PAGLIA now seated on a park bench near the triumphal
arch.)

PAGLIA: You're, like, part Italian, right? You're half Italian?
GLENNDA: Yes. I'm half Italian.

PAGLIA: Yes. Do you feel this? Do you feel the Italian energy?

GLENNDA: Yes, yes! It keeps me going. Motivation. Absolutely.

PAGLIA: Yeah. I mean, you see these little widows — they're like
eighty-year-olds — Italian widows running around. You know,
they outlive their husbands by thirty years. This is me. I wasn't
married, but I'm like a widow. You know, it's the same thing.
I'm like a widow or a nun.

GLENNDA: Yeah. I know Italian women — they would come to work,
they'd be in their eighties, and they'd still come to work. Every
single day to work. Work, work, work.

PAGLIA: Right, right.

GLENNDA: They're so determined.

PAGLIA: Yeah. And don't get in their way! They'll put — (makes
twisting gesture of putting the screws in) They're mean. They're

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 283

mean. They'll push you out of the way. (laughing) They're vi-
cious! They're vicious! An eighty-year-old Italian widow? Don't
get in her way!

GLENNDA (laughing): Well, I knew this Italian woman that worked
for my father, and she used to say, "The Mafia is beautiful."
(PAGLIA cackles,) And she used to whistle The Godfather theme
all the time.

PAGLIA: Oh really? Well, my grandmother used to say, you know,
Mussolini was beautiful — "bello"\

GLENNDA: She carried a knife, too.

paglia: Oh, I do, too!

GLENNDA: Yeah? That's what I thought.

PAGLIA: Yeah! You wanna see my knife?

GLENNDA: Oh, wow! We're gonna see Camille's knife!

PAGLIA (rummaging through her handbag): This is my knife, all right?
This was actually given to me by — Oh, no, that's my mascara!
Wait!

GLENNDA (laughing): Now, that could be a deadly weapon.

PAGLIA: I'm so split! I'm so split — my personality. Oh, here it is.
(She unsheathes the slim silver blade and displays it to GLENNDA and
the camera.)

GLENNDA: Wow. Wow! It's very compact. It looks like a nail file.
It's beautiful. Wow.

PAGLIA: My friend, Bruce Benderson, the writer, gave this to me.
It's a Ninja knife from 42nd Street. He knows 42nd Street in-
timately. It's probably illegal, but I'm not sure. I don't care.

GLENNDA: Oh, who cares?

PAGLIA: Yeah, who cares? Right.

GLENNDA: We're breaking the rules today.

284 VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: Whenever I sign books, I have my men next to me, you
see, and I have my Ninja knife, and I fear nothing.

( Cut to Fifties footage of a curvaceous Miss America. Cut to GLENNDA and
CAMILLE, standing in front of a lifesize cutout of Betty Grable in an 8th
Street shop window between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.)

GLENNDA: You know, there was a documentary about Miss America
pageants, and Miss Americas in the 1950s were voluptuous,
with big hips. And now they're — I like the Miss Americas better
in the Fifties and Sixties.

PAGLIA: I agree.

GLENNDA: They're, like, white bread, and they all look the same.
They all have the same hairdos. (PAGLIA laughs.) It's just not
the same. I mean, the feminists complain about, "Oh, it's ex-
ploiting women." I just think it's banal, what's happened.

PAGLIA: Right. Well, you know, this idea that somehow beauty
contests are a way to make women into meat or to turn them
into just objects — that is absurd. The idea of the beauty contest
goes all the way back to ancient times. The judgment of Paris,
you know — where Paris had to judge the three goddesses, and
he awarded the apple, the golden apple, to Aphrodite, and she
gave him, in turn, the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen
of Troy. Which started the Trojan War. You know, it caused
problems.

GLENNDA: Absolutely.

PAGLIA (ruefully): It caused problems. But —
GLENNDA: It caused a lot of problems.

PAGLIA: Yeah, a lot of problems. But the point is the idea of judging
beauty seems to me, you know, just part of our tradition, and
I just refuse to take it that seriously. I mean, I'm not someone
who is a compulsive shopper or dresser, but I love watching the
beauty shows. I always did. Right from the start, I've never
regarded them as sexist.

GLENNDA: They're amusing. You know, I saw this great documen-
tary where this feminist was protesting, and she dressed in a

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

285

meat dress, a dress made out of lamb chops and hamburger
patties.

PAGLIA (whooping): That's great!

GLENNDA: And even though she was, like, an extreme feminist, I
just thought her style was amazing. She just seemed so uncon-
scious of the style that she had — the meat dress. And she was
wearing high heels, and she was yelling, "Judge meat, not
women!" But she was still fabulous. I loved her.

(Cut to 1985 news footage of spike-heeled protester in mini-dress at Miss
California pageant shouting, cc Judge meat, not women! 39 Cut to GLENNDA
and PAGLIA crossing street at 8th and Sixth Avenue. They bear down on a
curbside table staffed by two dour women aggressively wielding blow-ups of
pornographic photos. It is a protest by WAP [Women Against Pornography] ,
who have forced these photos on pedestrians around New York for years.)

GLENNDA: Wow! Oh, lookit, Camille, look!

PAGLIA (imitating Roseanne Arnold through much of this scene): Oh, my
Gawd!

GLENNDA: It's Hustler!

PAGLIA (archly): It is. Let's look. What are — who are these people?
GLENNDA (with feigned innocence): What is going on over here? Look!
PAGLIA: What are they doing?

GLENNDA: Wow! (Reads one of their signs) "PORN IS WOMAN HATE."
PAGLIA (heavily Roseanne): Oh, my Gawd!

GLENNDA (posing Socratic questions): Camille, what is going on here?

PAGLIA (with feigned wonder): They're anti-porn feminists!

(The scene degenerates from this point on. The protesters yank away the posters
or flip the backs to the cameras. One woman strikes at the camera with her
poster. The film crew angrily protests. There is pushing and shoving and a
general melee. The CENTURIONS move in, as a large crowd quickly gathers.
The husky torsos and arms of RENNARD SNOWDEN and BRIAN ROACH are
glimpsed protecting the camera.)

286 VAMPS & TRAMPS

GLENNDA: Wait, wait, I wanna sec the picture!
PAG LI A (archly): Oh, my Gawd!

GLENNDA AND CAMILLE (simultaneously reading the sign and chanting
together like Oscar Wilde's Gwendolen and Cecily): "FEMINISTS
FIGHTING PORNOGRAPHY"!

OFFSCREEN PROTESTER: We don't want our picture taken.

GLENNDA: Look at this, (reading) "PORN DEGRADES WOMEN."

PAGLIA (reading): "PORN DEGRADES WOMEN."

GLENNDA (feigning wonder): This is unbelievable! Can we see the
pic — wow! Look, Camille, look at the pictures!

PAGLIA: What? Oh, my Gawd! Look!

GLENNDA (lustily): It's hot! Wow! Bondage!

PAGLIA: That is hot!

GLENNDA: Where can we get some of that?

PAGLIA (with delight): Bondage! Oh, my! (glancing at the protesters) They
seem very phobic, don't they?

GLENNDA: I don't think they like us, Camille.

PAGLIA (dreamily): I don't think they do.

GLENNDA: Wait, what's going on?

PAGLIA: Isn't that amazing? They don't want their pictures taken.

GLENNDA (addressing the protesters): What does the petition do? What
is it for?

OFFSCREEN PROTESTER: No, I don't want it for you.
PAGLIA (Roseanne again): Oh, my Gawd!
GLENNDA: It's not for us? Why? We're Americans.
PAGLIA: They don't want us. They don't —
OFFSCREEN PROTESTER: Identify yourselves.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 287

PAGLIA: My name is Camille Paglia —
OFFSCREEN PROTESTER: Oh, no!
PAGLIA: — and this is Glennda Orgasm!
GLENNDA (laughing): I'm Glennda Orgasm.
PAGLIA: And we love pornography!
GLENNDA: We love it.
PAGLIA: And we want sex! We are tired —
glennda: More sex!

PAGLIA: — of the anti-porn feminists and their bad attitudes!

GLENNDA: A day without pornography is like a day without sun-
shine!

PAGLIA: Oh, my Gawd — yes! I can't believe you're on the street just
when we're filming our thing. Oh, my God, look at them.

(The protesters whisper to each other while shielding their posters from the
cameras.)

ONE PROTESTER TO THE OTHER (aghast, gesturing toward PAGLIA as
if she were Satan): I'm glad to know who it is!

GLENNDA: Do you have any gay pornography?

PAGLIA: Look at them.

GLENNDA: Do you have any lesbian pornography?

PAGLIA (eagerly): Do you have lesbian pornography here? Do you
have any s & m pornography?

GLENNDA: They have — look — that's —

( Crowd mills about, as one protester again tries to interfere with the camera
by striking at it with her poster.)

MALE VOICE IN CROWD: Keep your hands off my First Amendment!
PAGLIA (to film crew and bodyguards): Watch out! Watch the cable!

288 VAMPS & TRAMPS

OFFSCREEN PROTESTER: We don't want our pictures taken!

GLENNDA (to the protester): What? Oh, come on! It's a photo op! It's
publicity!

PAGLIA (to the protester): Well, they're not. They're photographing us!
GLENNDA: They don't want the publicity!

PAGLIA: They don't want the publicity. They're afraid! You're afraid!
You're afraid! You people are afraid. You've got no guts!

GLENNDA: Come on! Publicity!

VOICE IN CROWD: It's Camille!

PROTESTER (to film crew as she snatches away her flailing poster): Get your
hands off of my property!

PAGLIA (starting to get angry): You don't own the street corner, honey!

GLENNDA (laughing): Yeah! Come on, this is a —

PAGLIA: Yeah, you guys are real tough, aren't you, when no one is
contradicting your ideas. You people are hypocrites! You people
are phobes! You people are puritans, okay?

GLENNDA (sternly to protesters): What do you think you're doing?

PAGLIA (building up to high pitch of Italian Jury): And now we are here,
okay? Your opponents are here! Instead of your usual bullying,
okay, you have some people who can oppose you, okay, who know
something about art! Who aren't so fucking phobic as you are,
okay?

GLENNDA: Pornography is art. Why don't they know that?

PAGLIA: You people are like mental defectives as far as I'm con-
cerned, okay? You finally have someone who can deal with you,
and you're shrinking! You people are wimps!

GLENNDA: Oh, they're having a conference.

PAGLIA: Wimps!

GLENNDA: They're having a conference.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 289

PAGLIA: Granola lesbian wimps! Okay, alright? (Shouting) An\\-art,
antwtfx, anti-every thing! You people can go to hell! OK? Camille
Paglia is here — in your face!

PROTESTER (to PAGLIA): Why did you lose your job teaching at
Bennington College?

GLENNDA (groaning with exasperation): Ohh!

PAGLIA (infuriated at this reactionary appeal to authority, leaps two steps
toward the flinching protester.): Because I am, like, an in-your-face
feminist, okay? And I got in a fistflght! Okay? (Applause, whistles,
and shouts of approval from the crowd, whom PAGLIA now turns to and
bellows at.) The feminism of the twenty-first century will be pro-
art! Pro-sex! Pro-porn!

GLENNDA: More porn! More porn!

PAGLIA: Yes, more porn!

GLENNDA: More porn!

PAGLIA: We're tired of you guys! The backlash is against you people!
You guys have caused the backlash —

GLENNDA: It's true!

PAGLIA: — wither bad attitude! Get real! Get real!

YOUNG FEMALE ONLOOKER (stepping out of the crowd and pointing toward
PAGLIA): So why don't you put on some nipple clamps?

PAGLIA: Get into the new age! Okay? Grow up! Grow up!

FEMALE ONLOOKER: Why doesn't she put on nipple clamps and,
like, get on her knees then? (sarcastically) Okay, it'll be real artful.

PAGLIA: Oh, wow! Yeah! Why don't you read a book, honey? You
obviously haven't read something recently, okay?

female onlooker: Oh, please!

PAGLIA: Go buy a book. Go buy a book, (looks theatrically up and down
the street) Where's a bookstore? (points to onlooker) Send this
woman to a bookstore! (points to protester) Send this woman to an

290 VAMPS & TRAMPS

art store! Go look at a painting! Go look at Caravaggio, Mi-
chelangelo! Look at Greek art! Okay? This is, like, so fucking
puritanical. Go to India! Pro-sex Hinduism! This is bullshit! Bull-
shit! (makes aggressive Rolling Stones toss of the mike) You people SUCK!

FEMALE ONLOOKER: So are you saying that it's okay to degrade a
woman?

PAGLIA (impatient): Oh, honey, go read a book!
FEMALE ONLOOKER: Go read a book yourself!
PAGLIA: You're into your ''degradation"!
FEMALE ONLOOKER: No!

PAGLIA: You are in a mind-set! You have been brainwashed! You have
been programmed!

FEMALE ONLOOKER: No, no! I'm all for sex. I love sex.

PAGLIA (suddenly noticing the animated onlooker's very appealing dusky skin
and large breasts, bursting out of a tight, sleeveless olive-green military
shirt): Uh uh. No!

FEMALE ONLOOKER: I love sex, okay?

PAGLIA (softening slightly because sensually distracted): Honey, go to a
museum!

FEMALE ONLOOKER: I love sex.

PAGLIA (pulling herself together): Oh, right. Yeah, except when it in-
volves ideology, you love sex. Okay, let's move on to our next
stop, Glennda.

GLENNDA: Yeah, I think we should.

PAGLIA (cheerfully): Bye now!

GLENNDA (laughing): I think we've made our mark here.
PAGLIA: Have a happy day!

(Cut to GLENNDA and PAGLIA ten minutes later, standing in front of a
restaurant and bar on Christopher Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village.)

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

291

GLENNDA (sighing with relief): Whew! Here we are, Glennda and
Camille, and I'm still overheated and trying to calm down from
our encounter with the WAP women — Women Against Porn.
Wow! That was quite a ruckus!

PAGLIA: Those people were wimps! They had nothing! I mean, they're
so used to bullying and harassing people on the street. When
they had someone to contradict them, they just absolutely, you
know, fell apart. And not only that, but their fascist attempt to
shut off the cameras! They want to stand there and scream but
not appear on camera. These people are hypocrites! These peo-
ple have no courage. They're just like little schoolyard bullies.

GLENNDA: Well, you know, I feel like we're safe now. We've, found
refuge. We're at Stonewall. Stonewall —

PAGLIA (in mock surprise): No, no! (raises her hands like an ecstatic Baroque
saint)

GLENNDA: — where the revolution started. Yes!

PAGLIA (looking at the bland facade of the renamed bar): This can't be
Stonewall. Is this really Stonewall?

GLENNDA: Yes. This is Stonewall.

PAGLIA: Well, if it's really Stonewall, then, like the Pope, I have to
kiss the ground.

GLENNDA: Okay.

PAGLIA: All right. (She falls to her knees, kisses the pavement, and bows in
Islamic obeisance.) Ah! Stonewall!

GLENNDA (laughing): Wow. That was amazing. (In the background, the
CENTURIONS, quaffing Evian, solemnly peruse the street.)

PAGLIA: Where the drag queens revolted.

GLENNDA: Yes. And you know what we should talk about now,
Gamille? Actually, you need your microphone. (A crew member
hands a mike to PAGLIA.J

I PAGLIA (brightly, like TV host Bob Barker): Thank you!

292

VAMPS & TRAMPS

GLENNDA: The march on Washington. The [April 1993] gay march
on Washington.

paglia: Yeah.

GLENNDA: Do you know, I saw a lot of news. I couldn't go, because
I was too busy. As you were, too. We were just too busy.

PAGLIA: Well, I was boycotting it, because I hate those people who
run that. You know, they certainly did not open up the podium
to anyone who did not agree with their views.

GLENNDA: Right. The thing is there was a lot of focus away from
drag queens. Because they were interviewing people on MTV,
and everyone was saying, "Nope, no drag queens here! Look,
no drag queens, just normal folks. Just white middle-class Amer-
icans, and we just want our rights, and that's what it's all about!"

PAGLIA (nodding in agreement): Actually, the C-Span cameras kept on
showing a kind of huge sea of white middle-class people. It was
like a shopping mall!

GLENNDA: A sea of white faces.

PAGLIA: Yes. And it was very discouraging, in many ways. It was
sort of, like, you know, what's the point? These people are de-
manding their rights? They look like they have their rights. Just
a bunch of privileged people who just wanted to party. There
was nothing particularly marginal, you know? People on the
podium, claiming marginality, when in fact there were hundreds
of thousands of shopping-mall people there!

GLENNDA: Well, to be fair, there were a lot of drag queens there, but
this group called the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defa-
mation — the leaders sent out press releases saying "Please" to
the general media, "Media, please do not focus on the drag
queens and the leather people, because they're a bad represen-
tation for our community."

PAGLIA: Oh, it is disgusting. Oh, it is yuppification, yuppification!
This is not the Sixties, okay? I mean, I hate this.

GLENNDA: That's not revolutionary, to hide the drag queens.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

293

PAGLIA: That is not revolutionary, no, no.

GLENNDA: You know, next year is the anniversary. Twenty-five years
since the death of Judy Garland and the Stonewall Rebellion.

PAGLIA: Oh, my God. Unbelievable. See, Stonewall — I mean, it was
the drag queens who pulled up paving stones and fought back
against the police. The drag queens were the ones who had the
balls to fight. It wasn't the yuppified, white bourgeois gay guys
who did any fighting! Okay? So the drag queens were at the
start of the revolution. How easy it is for people to forget that!

GLENNDA: Mmm hmm.

PAGLIA: Exactly. See, I feel that the problem with gay activism right
now is that it's too ghettoized. It wants special rights for one
group. I feel the true Sixties revolution is about arguing for the
protection of all nonconformist behavior of every kind.

GLENNDA: Right. Absolutely.

PAGLIA: Homosexuality is only one area within that, okay? And I
think that that is the terrible flaw of gay activism. And so I
don't get along at all with the gay activist establishment. It's
that there's no philosophical perspective, there's no real vision
in them. They're just a bunch of people who are totally insular.
They hate me. They call me homophobic. Oh, right, with my
history, I'm "homophobic," honey! Yeah, like I'm —

GLENNDA: "Self-hating."

PAGLIA: — I'm "misogynist" and "pro-rape." That's another one I
hear.

GLENNDA (laughing): Pro-rape!

PAGLIA: Right! And so the drag queens fit directly into such an
argument. I mean, what could be more nonconforming than a
drag queen?

GLENNDA: Well, it's unfortunate that this gay rights movement has
caused more marginalization of other groups — drag queens and
cross-dressers, straight and gay cross-dressers, and people who

294 VAMPS & TRAMPS

are into the s & m lifestyle and fetishes. Those people are being
pushed further into the margins, instead of, you know, a more
inclusive —

PAGLIA: Yeah. My thinking is that we need a libertarian philosophy
that argues for the civil rights of all acts in the private realm.
That's what I'm arguing for. And we cannot just have a sort of
gay versus straight dichotomy, (angrily) Right now, the gay ac-
tivist establishment is a bunch of sanctimonious, pious people
up on a pulpit. I have never heard such dogma, except from
the feminist establishment — that's the only one that's worse, you
know?

GLENNDA: A lot of feminist rhetoric trickles down into the gay move-
ment, I've noticed.

PAGLIA: That's right. And in my opinion, anyone in the gay activist
movement who adopts feminist rhetoric is misogynist, because
feminist rhetoric is based on the victimization of woman.

GLENNDA: Mmm hmm.

PAGLIA: Woman as victim. Drag queen philosophy is based on the
idea of woman as dominatrix of the universe! Ruler of the cosmos!
All right? That's why I follow the drag queen philosophy and
not gay activist or feminist philosophy.

( Cut to GLENNDA and PAGLIA amid the crowds at the annual Christopher
Street Fair. Behind them, a handsome young gay man with a studded black-
leather band around his biceps is vigorously pummeling a woman on a large
wooden massage rack.)

GLENNDA (with feigned innocence): Camille, what's going on?
PAGLIA (gleefully): Someone is being tortured.
GLENNDA: Wait — no, no, Camille, it's massage.
PAGLIA: Oh, deep massage!
GLENNDA: Deep massage.

paglia: Interesting how massage and torture look so similar.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

295

GLENNDA: I thought we had stumbled upon an s & m street fair!

PAGLIA: You know, I have heard of all kinds of massage rituals
where people walk on backs and crack their back and so on. I
mean, you know, Swedish massage is very close to s & m.

GLENNDA: There's a very sadistic and masochistic relationship there.

PAGLIA: There is. In fact, in old Hollywood movies there was the
motif of the kind of big, burly woman who was the Swedish
masseuse, you know?

GLENNDA: Yeah. A big butch woman.

PAGLIA: A big butch woman. And she would, like, hammer on you
and so on. (beaming with delight) I think that this has not been
really fully considered — the connection between Swedish mas-
sage and s & m!

GLENNDA: But I like seeing it out in the open. It's nice. Look! Look
at him go! It's amazing.

PAGLIA (laughing): Isn't that incredible!

GLENNDA: Wow.

PAGLIA: Now, you know, I think a lot of this is a kind of substitute
for the old rituals of the Catholic Church, where you would beat
yourself, flagellate yourself —

GLENNDA: Oh! But do you think it has pagan roots as well?

PAGLIA: Well, I think all abuse of the body has pagan roots, yes.
But the mortification of the flesh in the Middle Ages — you would
atone for your sins by beating yourself till you were bloody. In
fact, such excesses were forbidden at one point by the Church,
because —

GLENNDA: Are those the monks that whip themselves? (Imitates self-
flagellation) I've seen —

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VAMPS 8e TRAMPS

(Film of Eastern Rite monks whipping their bloody backs.)

PAGLIA: Monks and nuns were getting very carried away. There
were little tiny whips with hooks on the end.

glennda: Wow.

PAGLIA: Yeah. So a lot of the rituals of the Catholic Church have
strong s & m components.

GLENNDA: Do they still do that?

PAGLIA: Well, the modern Church frowns on it, because it under-
stood the kind of perverse sexual pleasure, apparently, that some
monks and nuns were getting from it.

GLENNDA: Whoa!

PAGLIA: But Robert Mapplethorpe certainly realized this connec-
tion. And my friend Bruce Benderson has often loved French
decadent literature for its strange perverse Catholicism, an ob-
session with s & m motifs. I feel there is a deep undercurrent
of sadomasochism in the Catholic Church. Especially the Med-
iterranean or Spanish versions of Catholicism.

GLENNDA: Maybe that's what that gay Catholic group is all about.

PAGLIA (pursing her lips): Oh —

GLENNDA: There's a gay Catholic group.

PAGLIA: I know, but Dignity is a little bit too white-bread for me!

GLENNDA (laughing): They are.

PAGLIA: They're too — they're a bunch of yuppies.

GLENNDA: They are.

PAGLIA: Really. No, I don't want to condemn them, but (grinning
and smacking her lips obscenely) I want to put some blood into that
little sect!

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES 297

( Cut to GLENNDA and CAMILLE standing outside Gay Pleasures, a bookstore
on Hudson Street.)

GLENNDA: Camille, let's go shopping for some good old-fashioned
gay male pornography!

PAGLIA: Yes, let's look for porn!

OFF-CAMERA VOICE: Come on in!

(GLENNDA, CAMILLE, and the CENTURIONS enter Gay Pleasures.)
PAGLIA: Oh, I love it!

GLENNDA: Wow! We're here at Gay Pleasures.

PAGLIA: Oh, my gosh, (picking up a book) Anal Pleasure and Health! I
love it. (picking up another one) Dream Stud! Look at these fabulous —
now, you would never find such fabulous things in a (sarcastically)
les-bi-an book store.

GLENNDA (laughing): Oh, could you imagine? At Judith's Room [a
lesbian bookstore}?

PAGLIA: Oh, no-o-o. Oh, my God! (laughs) Oh, look, look! (plucks
from a rack a postcard of David Sprigle's stylish nude photograph of a
nonchalant, princely black man with a spiked silver collar and large erect
penis) Now, see, if this were of a woman, you would have them
carrying on about how it's degrading and exploitative —

GLENNDA: Right.

PAGLIA: — but they refuse to consider the realities of gay male porn,
which is fabulous.

\

| GLENNDA: I never hear feminists talk about gay male porn.
PAGLIA: They don't.
GLENNDA: Why is that?

PAGLIA (heatedly): They don't want to admit it, because it disproves
their theory that all porn is about the degradation of women,
you see? And I'm saying I've learned an enormous amount from

298 VAMPS & TRAMPS

gay male porn! It's the hottest porn that there is! There's nothing
better.

GLENNDA: This is true.

PAGLIA: Because, you see, right now, heterosexual porn, it's really
not that interesting, because you've got just a lot of very expe-
rienced, professional actresses who fake orgasm. Now, with men,
you can't fake orgasm —

GLENNDA: It's true.

PAGLIA: I mean, it's either hard or it isn't hard, okay? (GLENNDA
laughs.) So this is why I love gay male porn, and I think many
other lesbian and bisexual women do as well, because it just is
hot. It's totally hot!

GLENNDA (looking at the displays): They have a lot of vintage stuff —
old things from the Fifties.

PAGLIA: Yes. I love things that come from a repressive past.

GLENNDA: Like look at this — Boys in Leather.

PAGLIA: Oh, right. Or this, with its kind of Greek motif — Trim. Not
only that, but gay male porn is honest about the sexual allure of
young people, okay?

GLENNDA: Mmm hmm. Right.

PAGLIA: And you'll notice that when there are boys of indeterminate
age, and even when there are boys who are the correct legal
age, they're made to look below the age, right?

GLENNDA: It's a cult of youth and beauty.

PAGLIA: It's a cult of youth and beauty. And I think that's absolutely
correct, and it's one of the great repressed subjects of right now,
okay? Because we're into this child abuse hysteria right now.
Everyone's hysterical about it.

GLENNDA: And it's killing sexuality.

PAGLIA: Killing sexuality, okay? The Lolita syndrome is one of the
few examples of it in a heterosexual context. And I think we're

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

299

ripe for a revival of Lolita. Certainly we saw with Amy Fisher,
okay, the "Long Island Lolita" —

GLENNDA: "The Long Island Lolita." There's a musical called The
Amy Fisher Musical. Did you hear about it?

PAGLIA (dishily, like Joan Rivers): I heard about it! Yes, I saw a little
bit of it. I love it. I mean, on TV, I saw a clip.

GLENNDA: It looks like Funny Girl — the sign. ( GLENNDA demonstrates.)
Like, for Funny Girl, and she's pointing a gun.

PAGLIA (pointing to another magazine): Look! Hand Jobs, (camera catches
the cover in closeup) Now, you see? Look how frank everything is
here! I mean, the frankness —

GLENNDA (laughing): It's out in the open.

PAGLIA: With gay men, the frankness of sexual desire is admitted! I
mean, there is no fooling around. There's no pretending it's like
this emotional thing.

GLENNDA: Ideology and theory.

PAGLIA: There's no ideology.

GLENNDA: Books of theory that you have to read!

PAGLIA: It also avoids the sentimentality, the hand-holding, the
pretending that it's ail about, you know, (imitates prissy, WASPy
female voice) love and nurturing, (switches to raunchy Big Mama voice)
There's no nurturing, okay, at all! (GLENNDA laughs.) I love it!
It's like just get it hard, you know, get it out there, stick it through
a hole, you know, get it off! I love it!

GLENNDA (guffawing): Great. That's it, absolutely.

PAGLIA: Yeah! So a lot of my theories about sex and pornography
come from gay men, and this is the great, invisible subject.

( Cut to shot of nearby magazine rack with magazines titled A Hard Lesson,
Black and Proud, Black Pharaohs, and Penis Coladas.J

GLENNDA: Why do you think there's such a vast amount of gay male
pornography but not an equal amount of lesbian woman-on-
woman porn? Why is that?

300

VAMPS & TRAMPS

PAGLIA: Well, my observations of this confirm what Masters and
Johnson found. That is, on the track of sexual frequency, they
found that the individuals with the most sexual experience and
activity were gay men. Next down the line were straight men.
Next down the line to that were straight women. The group of
human beings with the least frequency of sexual activity were
(trumpeting derisively) les-bi-ans, okay?

GLENNDA (laughing): Is that why it's hard for you to get a date?

PAGLIA (ruefully): I get no dates. My life has been a ruin.

GLENNDA: Oh!

PAGLIA: I'm just an old nun. What can I say? No, it's true. Not
only that, but there seems to be evidence that men are more
visually stimulated towards, you know, sexual desire. Now, I'm
just a kind of mutant, obviously, because I have always been
highly interested in visual things.

GLENNDA: But some days you feel like a man, right? Are there some
days you wake up and you feel like a man?

PAGLIA: I began as a man, and I'm turning back into a man at the
end of my life, I'm afraid. As menopause approaches, I'm turn-
ing back into a man, I think, yeah.

GLENNDA: It's part of this abstract transsexualism, I've noticed.

(Cut to Fifties footage of a muscular, oiled man lying languorously on his
stomach with bare buttocks prominently aloft. He is skimming through a pa-
perback called I Can Take It All. )

GLENNDA: You have like this transsexual streak.

PAGLIA: Mmm hmm. Oh, I do. I absolutely do. I love it. (picks up
a copy of a magazine called Stroke, with a cover photo of a nude man
acrobatically performing auto-fellatio) Look at this! Look at this!
Fabulous.

GLENNDA: Those are the expensive ones. I always buy them when
they're on sale.

PAGLIA (reading the cover headline): Oddities and Atrocities.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

301

GLENNDA: But look — fifteen dollars. But they're good.

PAGLIA: Oh, my God! That is great. That is absolutely great! (like
a kid in a candy store) Oh, look at all this fabulous stuff! (leafing
through another paperback) Oh, see, men in uniform! I love things
with men in uniform. I love Tom of Finland. He's a great favorite
of mine, and Robert Mapplethorpe loved Tom of Finland too.

GLENNDA: He's great, yeah, (still looking at Stroke) Well, I like that
this says Oddities and Atrocities, because so many people try to
normalize gay sex. It's like, "It's normal, it's just like anything
else." I don't want it to be normal, sometimes!

PAGLIA: That's right, that's right. Exactly.

GLENNDA: It's on the edge. It's outlaw.

PAGLIA: Well, I feel that all sexuality makes use of the taboo. In any
culture, okay, if something is taboo, it becomes erotic. For ex-
ample, women's ankles were invisible throughout the nineteenth
century, so the mere glimpse of a woman's ankle caused people
to go into a frenzy of eroticism, you see? And so, yes, I love the
title Oddities and Atrocities. I may take that for my next book!

GLENNDA (laughing): That could be the subtitle for Sexual Personae,
Part Two!

PAGLIA: I'm looking for a title for my next book, my next essay
collection, (joking) We may have found it, Glennda, right here!
Right here!

GLENNDA: We found it at Gay Pleasures. Oh, my God! Right here
at Gay Pleasures!

PAGLIA (addressing the camera confidentially, imitating Sandra Bernhard)
Right here at this moment, you saw it!

( Cut to GLENNDA and CAMILLE leafing through another bin of magazines
and books.)

GLENNDA: We're looking through some old 1950s . . . this one's
called Tomorrow's Man, and that one's called — what is it called?

paglia: Vim!

302

VAMPS & TRAMPS

GLENNDA: And the thing is, in the Fifties they sort of masqueraded
these magazines as muscle builders, body builders, so that they
could get away with selling them. But they're really, you know,
for certain gay men to read and enjoy —

PAGLIA: All kinds of bulging crotches.

GLENNDA: Some of them have women in them. Like this one — the
two bodybuilders holding up a sexy woman.

PAGLIA (showing a photograph): Or this large bosom here.

GLENNDA: Which I think is great, because I think a lot of modern
gay porn doesn't. I like to see women in it sometimes, because
I think there's something really hot to just have a woman there
sometimes. It's like bisexual and —

PAGLIA: I feel that's the revolution, Glennda!

GLENNDA (nodding): Yeah.

PAGLIA: I feel the revolution is for us to totally extend the level of
our responsiveness in a bisexual direction. Whether we actually
are bisexually active or not.

GLENNDA: Right. It's your sexual imagination.

PAGLIA: Sexual imagination!

GLENNDA: It should, if you can include that and see sexuality as a
continuum, rather than gay over here or straight over there.

( Cut to GLENNDA and CAMILLE bathed in late afternoon light, as they stand
near the splintered piers on the West Side Highway at 11th Street, near the
old site of the Anvil, a notorious Seventies-era gay bar.)

GLENNDA (like Judy Garland as Dorothy): Oh, my God, Camille! We
made it all the way over to the piers. I didn't think it was gonna
happen, but we're here. We made it!

PAGLIA (like Dame Edna Everage): We have really been walking our
little legs off today!

GLENNDA: And this is as far west as you can really go. I mean, we're
at the West Side, the Hudson River, and we're by one of the
piers. But look — look at this pier, Camille.

MEMOIRS AND ADVENTURES

303

PAGLIA: It's amazing.

GLENNDA: It's very postapocalyptic.

PAGLIA: It really is. The pier is in a complete state of ruin.
( Cut to pan of pier.)

GLENNDA: You know what they call this pier? This is "The Sex
Pier." People come here to have sex, late at night, during the
day. Sexual outlaws come here — gay sexual outlaws.

PAGLIA: That is so great.

GLENNDA: And, you know, people fall in the water during sex or
during their orgasm. Didn't Freud call the orgasm "The Little
Death" . . . petite . . . petite —

PAGLIA: Well, that goes back centuries, actually, that idea.

GLENNDA: Oh, so he got it from somewhere else.

PAGLIA: Yes. You really risk death here. The timbers seem shattered
with the force of so many orgasms!

GLENNDA: But that's the thing that gay men understand — the risks
that you take sometimes in these public situations, that there's
a little bit of a thrill. And maybe it's irresponsible, but if that's
what you're into, you know, you have a right, if you want to come
out here.

PAGLIA: Mmm hmm.

GLENNDA: Maybe you'll fall in the water, maybe you won't!

PAGLIA: That's exactly right, Glennda. This is what I'm always
saying about the feminist problem with date rape, okay? That
gay men understand there is risk and danger in sexuality, par-
ticularly the outlaw kind. I've learned so much from gay men.
I'm sick and tired of women whining. They go on a date, they
get in this car with a stranger, go to a man's room, and then
they're surprised when something happens, you know? I mean,
I love the gay male attitude, which is to go out into the dark,
have anonymous sex. Right from the period of the Roman Em-

304

VAMPS & TRAMPS

pire — under the arches of the Colosseum — people understood
that you go out on a sexual adventure as a gay man, you may
not come home again. You may get beaten up. That's one of
the thrills. That is the aura. It's sort of the erotic aura that's
around outlaw sex. So again I feel that gay men have so much
to teach establishment feminism about what sex is.

(Cut to GLENNDA and CAMILLE at another pier, with the World Trade
Center towers in the distance behind them.)

GLENNDA (addressing the camera): Camille and I have finished our
tour! It's the end of Glennda and Camille Do Downtown.

PAGLIA: It's been a wonderful day, Glennda!

GLENNDA: It was beautiful. Of course, we learned a lot. We talked
about a lot of topics, (to the camera) And just keep tuning in to
the show, (to PAGLIA,) Maybe we'll do another show.

PAGLIA: This is fabulous!

GLENNDA: Or two.

PAGLIA: Maybe this'll be a series!

GLENNDA: Yeah — Glennda and Camille . . . The Series/ (They laugh.)
Thanks for tuning in. Bye!

PAGLIA (waving cheerfully to the camera like the Beverly Hillbillies): Bye,
now!

(Loud rock music as credits roll over montage of the day: the CENTURIONS
stopping traffic at the arch, PAGLIA castigating the WAP women and kissing
the ground at Stonewall, PAGLIA showing ojf a Keith Richards graphic on
the back of her T-shirt, GLENNDA and PAGLIA doing a hip-bumping boogie.
Cut to GLENNDA and PAGLIA snickering on 8th Street, when they first spot
the women protesters half a block away.)

PAGLIA (yelling with delight): Hey, bitches! (lewdly sticks out tongue)

GLENNDA (giggling): Let's tip their table over!

PAGLIA (laughing and cupping hand to mouth): Feminist bitches!

ON LITERATURE
AND ART

gypsy tigress:

CARMEN

Georges Bizet's Carmen (1875) is the first music I remember
hearing as a child. It remains for me the definition of what music
is and what it should be — brilliant and passionate, overwhelming
the senses with its directness and force.

I was mesmerized by a picture of Rise Stevens as Carmen in
the album notes. For some reason, the fiery, laughing lady with
piercing eyes had a rose between her teeth. It seemed savage and
strange, an unsettling symbolism I never understood. In my parents'
opera book was a colorful drawing of the toreador Escamillo parad-
ing in his glittering suit of lights. I loved his arrogance and glamour.
And so at age six in 1953, I was Escamillo for Halloween. There is
a photograph of me beaming in my black satin outfit trimmed with
red and posing with a furled umbrella in lieu of a sword.

We are in a period where it has become fashionable to attack
the great classics of art. A debunking cynicism passes for sophisti-
cation these days. "Misogyny," "male domination," and "phallic
violence" are everywhere, we are told, in nineteenth-century opera,
with its suffering heroines. The ravishing music merely masks the

[Stagebill, August 1992]

307

308

VAMPS & TRAMPS

"oppression" for a callous bourgeois audience. Carmen, for example,
is a "male fantasy," and the opera is, at heart, a "snuff film."

Well, Carmen is no male fantasy, for she was my fantasy too.
Bizet's heroine, even more imperious than her somewhat rough and
uncouth gypsy forebear in Prosper Merimee's original novella
(1845), is a spectacular sexual persona, a charismatic dominatrix
possible only in Western culture, which gave birth to the indepen-
dent, strong-speaking woman. The role has been treated in a variety
of ways by different singers, whose voices range from throaty low
mezzo to soprano. Some Carmens are cool and detached; others are
earthy and tempestuous.

The most famous American Carmen was Rise Stevens, whose
hot-blooded, highly physical, and knockabout version was first per-
formed at the Met in 1943. Maria Callas never appeared onstage in
Carmen but made a much admired studio recording in Paris in 1964.
The theme has been a favorite in movie history ever since the first
silent versions were filmed in France ( 1 909) and Spain (1910). Theda
Bara, Pola Negri, Dolores Del Rio, and Rita Hayworth have starred
in the title role. Dorothy Dandridge was superb in Otto Preminger's
modernized Carmen Jones (1954), with its all-black cast. Marilyn
Home provided the vocal track.

The plot of Carmen has important precedents in Western liter-
ature. The officer Don Jose lured away from his military duty by
the temptress Carmen recalls Aeneas delayed by Dido's sensuality
and Mark Antony throwing away the world for Cleopatra. In a
Greek myth, the hero Hercules, enslaved to Omphale, actually dons
women's clothing. All these stories ask questions about love and
manhood. Sex contains many dangers. There is the risk of loss of
identity. Shakespeare's treatment of the Antony and Cleopatra saga
is complex and profound: he shows how Antony is enlarged by love
but finally destroyed by his reckless disregard of his public obliga-
tions as a man. This is also Jose's fate.

Carmen is secondly a work of Romanticism. The gypsies, with
their mysterious nomadic past, represent life in nature, an energy
wild and free. As thieves and smugglers, they are outcasts and out-
laws, rebel personae celebrated by the Romantics. Don Jose, the
deserter joining the gypsies, is a runaway and dropout, a motif

ON LITERATURE AND ART

309

familiar to us from the 1960s counterculture. He turns his back on
respectability, career advancement, and social acceptance. But he
puts all responsibility for his identity on Carmen. He makes himself
passive to her and thereby loses her interest. When she leaves him,
he is nothing. Hence his rage and despair. The opera is a tragedy
for both the central characters.

One of the most Romantic elements in Carmen is its interest in
intense emotion, which defeats reason, prudence, and common sense,
the balanced, moderate values of eighteenth-century neoclassicism.
The opera is a case study of jealousy, which swallows Jose up in
mad excess. Like Othello, he destroys the thing he loves. We are
currently amidst a national debate over rape and its motives. Bizet's
Carmen compellingly shows how a gentle, unassuming man can be
swept toward violence and murder.

Jose's psychology is expertly drawn. He is deeply attached to
his mother and native village. Micaela, his pious, mild-mannered
fiancee, comes to him as his mother's ambassador. Like Shake-
speare's Octavia, Micaela represents conventional womanhood, a
simplicity, innocence, and purity. She offers her man the quiet de-
votion of a lifetime. Carmen, on the other hand, like Cleopatra, is
a brawler and tawny-skinned tigress, overtly sexual and rapacious.
Jose is fascinated by Carmen's egotism and flamboyance, her brassy
brio and malicious sense of fun. Like Cleopatra, she has the many
moods of a woman but the aggression and drive of a man.

But what attracts Jose to Carmen is also what is dangerous
about her. Loving her is a gamble, and Jose loses. His simple idealism
about women, whom he identifies with his saintly mother, does not
prepare him for a monumental natural phenomenon like Carmen,
with her unbridled appetites and volatility. He is naive, sentimental.
When Carmen coldly spurns him, his childishness and dependency
return. His personality is not strong enough to withstand rejection.
He murders her as a way to preserve their connection. And his
horrified lament over her body immediately snaps back into a yearn-
ing for maternal consolation, as if he has been suddenly orphaned.
Perhaps this vocal passage is harmonically unresolved because man's
relation to woman can never be resolved.

Carmen is no helpless victim. It is simply untrue that the opera

3 1 O

VAMPS & TRAMPS

misogynistically condemns a woman to death for wanting a modern
sexual freedom. As one of the great femmes fatales of nineteenth-
century art, the voluptuous, bewitching, promiscuous Carmen has
an inner perversity and, at times, a cruelty bordering on the sadistic.
She first flirts with Jose merely because he is ignoring her. She enjoys
the challenge of seduction but becomes quickly bored. She keeps
trading up the male hierarchy, going after Escamillo because he is
the hottest new property. She uses and dumps Jose, insulting and
humiliating him unnecessarily and finally obliterating his identity.
He is conquered by Escamillo as much as by Carmen. Psychologi-
cally castrated, he avenges himself with the phallic knife.

Carmen is structured very much like Euripides' Bacchae. The
working-class gypsy is, like the populist god Dionysus, an anarchic
alien associated with magic, dance, and the pleasure principle. Both
Carmen and Dionysus lure a representative of the social order away
into the archetypal forest, where they cavalierly deconstruct his mas-
culine personality. Throughout the opera, the pagan elements of
Western culture are still at war with Judeo-Christianity, whose calm,
ascending, hymnlike measures Micaela and Jose use in vain against
Carmen's frenzied, escalating, percussive dance accents.

It was Bizet's riveting Spanish dance music that first seized my
attention as a child. I now see it pointed toward my generation's
domination by rock, which is energized by African-American dance
rhythms. Carmen's romantic story line, climaxing in a murder, is
itself a kind of bohemian apache dancing, a bruising courtship ritual.
The toreador too is a dancer who flirts with death.

The finale is brilliantly staged. Merimee's Carmen dies in the
forest, but Bizet ends his story as he began it, in a public square,
the symbol of Jose's lost social status. Alienated, solitary, he tries
to stop Carmen from entering the arena where the bullfight is about
to begin. The roaring crowd, hailing his rival Escamillo, is the com-
munity from which Jose is now severed. A dark, eerie, sinister music
wells up, like an earth tremor or rising storm wind. It is the shadow
of Fate as well as the raw, elemental power of sexuality that Carmen
has aroused but cannot control. We feel someone will die, but it
could as well be Jose.

In this parallel performance outside the arena, Carmen taunts
and goads Jose as if he were a bull. Trying to pass him, she is gored.

ON LITERATURE AND ART

31 1

She dies in the dirt, in squalor. But her last moments are those of
heroic defiance, as she chooses freedom above surrender. She refuses
to whine, cower, beg, or plead. She has acted, and she accepts full
responsibility for her actions. Capricious, carnal, greedy for life, she
has played the dangerous game of sex by her own rules. Death is
merely her final adventure.

ALICE AS EPIC HERO

"Lewis Carroll" was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodg-
son (1832-98), a mathematician and Anglican deacon who spent
his entire adult life as a sheltered fellow of Christ Church College
at Oxford University. Dodgson belongs to the history of literature,
rather than mathematics, because of his two masterpieces, Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871),
which were inspired by Alice Pleasance Liddell, young daughter of
the dean of Christ Church.

The Alice books are the greatest examples of the crowded genre
of Victorian children's literature, which sprang from the new Ro-
mantic vision of the child. For Rousseau and Wordsworth, children
have a primal innocence and purity; they are saintly and sexless
ambassadors of nature, untouched by corrupt society. Throughout
Victorian literature, including the classic novels of Charles Dickens,
the orphaned girl-child is the supreme symbol of profound emotion
and beleaguered virtue.

Carroll's Alice, one of the outstanding characters of world lit-
erature, is not an orphan, but in her stories she is mysteriously

[Introduction, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland I Alice Through the Looking
Glass, Book-of-the-Month Club, 1994]

ON LITERATURE AND ART

313

parentless. We hear of a sister, a nurse, and three cats, but the entire
adult world has been obliterated. It exists as empty architectural
spaces, as in eerie De Chirico paintings — a schoolroom or a drawing
room with a stone mantel, clock face, and mirror, through which
Alice steps into another dimension. The invisible hierarchical system
of social and familial authority has been re-created instead in the
'"wonderland" of the unconscious, our fascinating, baffling dream
life that Carroll, before Freud, was the first to systematically explore.

The Alice stories are modern psychological fairy tales but also
clever mock epics, like Pope's The Rape of the Lock. A seven-year-old
girl is the intrepid protagonist, embarked on the archetypal journey
of myth and legend that represents life itself. It is inquisitiveness, a
"burning" curiosity or thirst for knowledge, that plummets Alice
into her adventures in both books. Alone and lost, she shows courage
and resourcefulness. Strange, menacing beings and disorienting al-
terations of space and time beset her. But she survives by her wits,
reasoning her way through each problem and struggling to maintain
the imperial British code of good manners amid confusion and chaos.
On her heroic quest, normally the province of male warriors, Alice
is forever the outsider, the alien, rebuffed by hostile cliques and
quarreling in-groups, from the Mad Tea Party to the Garden of Live
Flowers.

On her travels over the meadows and through the woods, Alice
never turns into Huck Finn, a smudged vagabond scamp. She re-
mains the well-bred young lady, her crisp apron and pinafore un-
disheveled even when she falls into a pool of tears or rockets up and
down, bizarrely changing size. After Bloomsbury, we have been too
ready to see male oppression in the nineteenth century. Alice's re-
silient femininity shows the power of Victorian womanhood. Rarely
fearful and never frail or hysterical, Alice reflects Carroll's real-life
adulation of little girls as superior to boys, whom he loathed and
avoided.

The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Alice
books would, in today's climate of sexual suspicion, get the author
into very hot water indeed. On July 4, 1862, two bachelor clergymen,
Carroll and Robinson Duckworth, took the three Liddell sisters on
one of many private boating parties on the Thames, which at various
times ended in the group hiding from the summer sun under a

3 14

VAMPS & TRAMPS

hayrick or getting soaked to the skin from a thunderstorm. On this
particular day, Carroll, entertaining the children with his usual ex-
temporaneous tales and riddles, created a fantasy starring his special
favorite, Alice, which was so mesmerizing that she pleaded for him
to write it down. The first manuscript was called Alice's Adventures
under Ground.

A lifelong celibate, Carroll had no known romances with adults.
Quiet, awkward, and introverted, he was afflicted with a bad stam-
mer that disappeared only in the company of children, whom he
loved to entertain. While traveling, he carried a black bag of games,
tricks, and puzzles to pique the attention of little girls. Carroll's
intentions were probably not overtly physical, like those of Humbert
Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, but perhaps it is naive to deny there
was an element of sublimated, voyeuristic eroticism in his attraction
to girls, with whom he may have secretly identified. As an amateur
portrait photographer of considerable distinction, Carroll took a
series of nude or seminude pictures of girls, many of which were
later destroyed, at his instructions. It appears that Mrs. Liddell, the
Dean's wife, disliked Carroll's loitering persistence, though he was
tolerated as a harmless, if tiresome, eccentric.

Games the Liddell sisters were learning — first croquet, then
chess — shape the two books. Carroll's vivid characters are often
game pieces come to life — the furious, stentorian Queen of Hearts
and her playing-card children, trembling gardeners, and loyal sol-
diers, who bend double to serve as croquet arches; or the pursed,
dictatorial Red Queen and kindly, untidy White Queen, whom Alice,
in her female rites of passage, encounters on the testing ground of
a vast geographical chessboard. Game motifs are also present in the
Dodo bird's tumultuous, circular Caucus-race and in the fierce ritual
combats of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and Unicorn,
and the Red Knight and maladroit White Knight. We know that
Carroll, a workaholic, obsessive-compulsive organizer and chronic
insomniac, used puzzles, math problems, and quirky mental inven-
tions to get himself through the night and to drive away irreverent
or impure thoughts. He was an early speculator in symbolic logic:
one of his academic books is called The Game of Logic.

But beyond this, Carroll sees all of life as a game, whose rules
we must learn by comic trial and error. Despite our best intentions,

ON LITERATURE AND ART

3 15

reality often proves refractory or rebellious, as when Alice, earnestly
trying to play croquet, finds her mallet, a live flamingo, twisting
itself upward to stare her in the face. Many Freudian interpretations
of the Alice books treat them in distressingly reductive terms as
neurotic manifestations of a social misfit. But it is equally possible
to see Carroll's maimed isolation and detachment as the inspiration
for his coolly scientific view of society as a webwork of conventions.
The best examples are his tea-party and courtroom scenes, with
their elaborate ceremonial formalism. Critics have rightly noted Car-
roll's prefiguration of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle, modernist
portraits of amoral, arbitrary authority.

There are analogies to the then-developing discipline of an-
thropology: Alice visits culture after culture, meeting their despotic
rulers, learning their foods, customs, and languages, and inadver-
tently violating their surprising taboos. For instance, she finds herself
in a Cyclops-like cave, the dusky shop of the curt, taciturn knitting
Sheep, with its porous shelving and uncooperative floating curios
and magic transformation into a stream lined with scented rushes.
There may also be influences from Darwin's natural history: Alice
confronts a host of familiar and exotic animals, insects, and plants,
who deem themselves quite equal and even superior to mere humans.
Each being has its own story, poem, or song, lengthy spiritual au-
tobiographies or genealogies which Alice listens to with polite pa-
tience that wears thin as the day goes on.

Carroll's anthropomorphism is never coy or sentimental, in the
standard Victorian way. The Alice books have the uncanny animism
of primitive religion: these daunting creatures are bold, brash, and
sharp-tongued. Even a pudding comes alive and indignantly berates
Alice ("What impertinence!") for cutting a slice of it. Tooth-and-
claw Darwinian themes of violence and carnivorousness abound:
Alice is always catching herself as she carelessly or, as Freud would
say, perversely mentions a predator (cats, humans) to its prey (mice,
birds, fish). And she herself has a quite un-Wordsworthian spirit of
sadistic mischief, as when she frightens her old nurse by shouting
in her ear, "Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena, and
you're a bone!" Carroll systematically subverts Victorian moralism
by making didacticism synonymous with humorlessness and sterility.

The aggressive voices of Carroll's characters are unique and

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

unforgettable. As in the great tradition of British drama (Carroll's
childhood love of the theater was squelched by his clergyman father),
personality is created by the power of language. Animals or objects
burst into speech and hector Alice, who holds her own in scuffling
fencing-matches of prickly dialogue. Carroll's meditations on lan-
guage anticipate twentieth-century literary theory. Both the Gnat
and Humpty Dumpty speculate about the relativity of names, and
the Cheshire Cat makes a philosophical argument for radical sub-
jectivity in our perceptions of the world. The ersatz Anglo-Saxon
poem "Jabberwocky" uses punning "portmanteau" words simul-
taneously to intensify meaning and to break it down into Carrollian
"nonsense" or absurdity. There is a persistent oscillation between
language and silence, as the seething, quarrelsome characters sud-
denly stop and stare at each other, mute and stunned.

The dramatic panache of the Alice books was appreciated early
on: a stage version of Alice in Wonderland appeared in London in 1886,
while Carroll was still alive. There have been three movies (released
in 1933, 1950, and 1972) and an animated Walt Disney musical
version (1951). However, the most indelible images remain those
created by Sir John Tenniel, a brilliant illustrator who labored under
Carroll's vexingly punctilious supervision. The Tenniel Alice with
long blonde tresses was based on another Carroll intimate, Mary
Badcock, rather than slim, dark-haired Alice Liddell, whose con-
nection to the first book was prudently obscured.

But it is surely Alice LiddelPs personality that draws us in and
charms us. "Who am I?" Carroll's Alice asks, like Odysseus, Oed-
ipus, and Hamlet, as she makes her way past the Elysian throngs
of boors, bores, and bullies, the meddlers, dandies, raconteurs, mon-
omaniacs, melancholies, tricksters, sophists, gurus, gluttons, loafers,
ninnies, male bunglers, and female termagants. The Alice books are
a Saturnalian dream-within-a-dream, a sequence of surreal cine-
matic episodes linked by the melting transitions and misty amnesia
of our innermost stream-of-consciousness. "I've a right to think,"
Alice defiantly declares to the ugly Duchess. In Carroll's panorama
of the mind, where Romantic imagination and Enlightenment in-
tellect join, Alice is our proxy in stubbornly making sense out of the
flux of time.

LOVE POETRY

In evaluating love poetry, we must first ask whether the language
is private and original or formulaic and rhetorical. Is the poet speak-
ing for him- or herself, or is the voice a persona? The poem, if
commissioned by friend or patron, may be a projection into another's
adventures, or it may be an improvised conflation of real and in-
vented details. A love poem cannot be simplistically read as a literal,
journalistic record of an event or relationship; there is always some
fictive reshaping of reality for dramatic or psychological ends. A love
poem is secondary rather than primary experience; as an imagina-
tive construction, it invites detached contemplation of the spectacle
of sex.

We must be particularly cautious when dealing with contro-
versial forms of eroticism like homosexuality. Poems are unreliable
historical evidence about any society; they may reflect the con-
sciousness of only one exceptional person. Furthermore, homoerotic
images or fantasies in poetry must not be confused with concrete
homosexual practice. We may speak of tastes or tendencies in early
poets but not of sexual orientation: this is a modern idea.

[The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Alex Preminger and
T. V. F. Bogan, eds., 3rd edition, 1993]

317

3 18

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Love poetry is equally informed by artistic tradition and con-
temporary cultural assumptions. The pagan attitude toward the
body and its pleasures was quite different from that of Christianity,
which assigns sex to the fallen realm of nature. The richness of
Western love poetry may thus arise in part from the dilemma of
how to reconcile mind or soul with body. Moreover, the generally
higher social status of women in Western as opposed to Eastern
culture has given love poetry added complexity or ambivalence: only
women of strong personality could have produced the tormented
sagas of Catullus or Propertius. We must try to identify a poem's
intended audience. In antiquity the love poet was usually addressing
a coterie of friends or connoisseurs; since Romanticism, however,
the poet speaks to him- or herself, with the reader seeming to over-
hear private thoughts. We must ask about pornographic material in
love poetry whether it reflects the freer sensibilities of a different
time or whether the poet set out to shock or challenge his contem-
poraries. Much love poetry is clearly testing the limits of decorous
speech, partly to bring sexual desire under the scrutiny and control
of imagination. In the great Western theme of the transience of time,
vivid sensuous details illustrate the evanescence of youth and beauty;
the poet has a godlike power to defeat time and bestow immortality
upon the beloved through art. Romantic impediments give the poem
a dramatic frame: the beloved may be indifferent, far away, married
to someone else, dead, or of the wrong sex. However, difficulty or
disaster in real life is converted into artistic opportunity by the poet,
whose work profits from the intensification and exploration of neg-
ative emotion.

The history of European love poetry begins with the Greek lyric
poets of the Archaic age (7th-6th centuries B.C.). Archilochus, Mim-
nermus, Sappho, and Alcaeus turn poetry away from the grand epic
style toward the quiet personal voice, attentive to mood and emotion.
Despite the fragmentary survival of Greek solo poetry, we see that
it contains a new idea of love, which Homer shows as foolish or
deceptive but never unhappy. Archilochus' account of the anguish
of love is deepened by Sappho, whose poetry was honored by male
writers and grammarians until the fall of Rome. Sappho and Alcaeus
were active on Lesbos, an affluent island off the Aeolian coast of
Asia Minor, where aristocratic women apparently had more freedom

ON LITERATURE AND ART

3 19

than later in classical Athens. Sappho is primarily a love poet, un-
interested in politics or metaphysics. The nature of her love has
caused much controversy and many fabrications, some by major
scholars. Sappho was married, and she had a daughter, but her
poetry suggests that she fell in love with a series of beautiful girls,
who moved in and out of her coterie (not a school, club, or cult).
There is as yet no evidence, however, that she had physical relations
with women. Even the ancients, who had her complete works, were
divided about her sexuality.

Sappho shows that love poetry is how Western personality de-
fines itself. The beloved is passionately perceived but also replace-
able; he or she may exist primarily as a focus of the poet's
consciousness. In "He seems to me a god" (fr. 31), Sappho describes
her pain at the sight of a favorite girl sitting and laughing with a
man. The lighthearted social scene becomes oppressively internal,
as the poet sinks into suffering: she cannot speak or see; she is
overcome by fever, tremor, pallor. "This description of the symptoms
of love had the most persistent influence over more than a thousand
years" (Albin Lesky). In plain, concise language, Sappho analyzes
her extreme state as if she were both actor and observer; she is
candid and emotional yet dignified, austere, almost clinical. This
poem, preserved for us by Longinus, is the first great psychological
document of Western literature. Sappho's prayer to Aphrodite
(fr. 1) converts cult-song into love poem. The goddess, amused at
Sappho's desperate appeal for aid, teasingly reminds her of
former infatuations and their inevitable end. Love is an endless cycle
of pursuit, triumph, and ennui. The poem, seemingly so charming
and transparent, is structured by a complex time scheme of past,
present, and future, the ever-flowing stream of our emotional life.
Sappho also wrote festive wedding songs and the first known de-
scription of a romantic moonlit night. She apparently invented the
now-commonplace adjective "bittersweet" for the mixed condition
of love.

Early Greek love poetry is based on simple parallelism between
human emotion and nature, which has a Mediterranean mildness.
Love-sickness, like a storm, is sudden and passing. Imagery is vivid
and luminous, as in haiku; there is nothing contorted or artificial.
Anacreon earned a proverbial reputation for wine, women, and song:

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his love is not Sappho's spiritual crisis but the passing diversion of
a bisexual bon vivant. Love poetry was little written in classical
Athens, where lyric was absorbed into the tragic choral ode. Plato,
who abandoned poetry for philosophy, left epigrams on the beauty
of boys. The learned Alexandrian age revived love poetry as an art
mode. Theocritus begins the long literary tradition of pastoral, where
shepherds complain of unrequited love under sunny skies. Most of
his Idylls contain the voices of rustic characters like homely Poly-
phemus, courting the scornful nymph Galatea, or Lycidas, a goat-
herd pining for a youth gone to sea. Aging Theocritus broods about
his own love for fickle boys, whose blushes haunt him. In his Epi-
grams, Callimachus takes a lighter attitude toward love, to which he
applies sporting metaphors of the hunt. In Medea's agonized passion
for Jason in the Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius tries to mesh love
poetry with epic. Asklepiades adds new symbols to love tradition:
Eros and arrow-darting Cupid. Meleager writes with equal relish of
cruel boys and voluptuous women, such as Heliodora. His is a poi-
gnant, sensual poetry filled with the color and smell of flowers.

The Greek Anthology demonstrates the changes in Greek love
poetry from the Alexandrian through Roman periods. As urban
centers grow and speed up, nature metaphors recede. Trashy street
life begins, and prostitutes, drag queens, randy tutors, and bathhouse
masseuses crowd into view. Love poets become droll, jaded, less
lyrical. Women are lusciously described but given no personalities
or inner life. Leonidas of Tarentum and Marcus Argentarius write
of voracious sluts with special skills; Antipater of Thessalonika
coarsely derides scrawny old lechers. For the first time, love poetry
incorporates ugliness, squalor, disgust. Boy-love is universal: Straton
of Sardis, editor of an anthology of pederastic poems, celebrates the
ripening phases of boys' genitals. By the early Byzantine period,
however, we feel the impact of Christianity, in more heartfelt sen-
timent but also in guilt and melancholy.

The Romans inherited a huge body of Greek love poetry. Ca-
tullus, the first Latin writer to adapt elegy for love themes, is obsessed
with Lesbia, the glamourous noblewoman Clodia, promiscuously
partying with midnight pickups. "I love and I hate": this tortured
affair is the most complex contribution to love poetry since Sappho,
whom Catullus admired and imitated. The poet painfully grapples

ON LITERATURE AND ART

32 1

with the ambiguities and ambivalences of being in love with an
aggressive, willful Western woman. He also writes tender love poems
to a boy, honey-sweet Juventius. There is no Roman love poetry
between adult men. Propertius records a long, tangled involvement
with capricious Cynthia, a fast-living new woman. There are sensual
bed scenes, love-bites, brawls. After Cynthia dies (perhaps poi-
soned), the angry, humiliated poet sees her ghost over his bed.
Tibullus writes of troubled love for two headstrong mistresses, adul-
terous Delia and greedy Nemesis, and one elusive boy, Marathus.
In Vergil's Eclogue 2, the shepherd Corydon passionately laments
his love-madness for Alexis, a proud, beautiful youth; the poem was
traditionally taken as proof of Vergil's own homosexuality. Horace
names a half dozen girls whom he playfully lusts for, but only the
rosy boy Ligurinus moves him to tears and dreams. In the Amoves,
Ovid boasts of his sexual prowess and offers strategies for adultery.
The Art of Love tells how to find and keep a lover, including sexual
positions, naughty words, and feigned ecstasies; The Remedies for Love
contains precepts for falling out of love. The love-letters of the Heroides
are rhetorical monologues of famous women (Phaedra, Medea)
abandoned by cads. Juvenal shows imperial Rome teeming with
effeminates, libertines, and pimps; love or trust is impossible. The
Empress prowls the brothels; every good-looking boy is endangered
by rich seducers; drunken wives grapple in public stunts. Martial
casts himself as a facetious explorer of this lewd world where erec-
tions are measured and no girl says no. The Dionysiaca, Nonnus' late
Greek epic, assembles fanciful erotic episodes from the life of Dion-
ysus. Also extant are many Greek and Latin priapeia: obscene comic
verses, attached to phallic statues of Priapus in field and garden,
which threaten thieves with anal or oral rape.

In medieval romance, love as challenge, danger, or high ideal
is central to chivalric quest. From the mid- 12th century, woman
replaces the feudal lord of the militaristic chansons de geste. French
aristocratic taste was refined by the courtly love of the Occitan
(Provencal) troubadours, who raised woman to spiritual dominance,
something new in Western love poetry. Amorous intrigue now lures
the hero: to consummate his adultery with Guinevere, Chretien de
Troyes' Lancelot bends the bars of her chamber, then bleeds into
her bed. The symbolism of golden grail, bleeding lance, and broken

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

sword of Chretien's Perceval is sexual as well as religious. Wolfram
von Eschenbach's German Parzival is vowed to purity, but adul-
terous Anfortas suffers a festering, incurable groin wound. Sexual
temptations are specifically set to test a knight's virtue in the French
romances Yder and Hunbaut and the Middle English Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight. The adultery of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan
and Isolde, with their steamy lovemaking, helped define Western
romantic love as unhappy or doomed. The Trojan tale of faithful
Troilus and treacherous Cressida was invented by Benoit de Sainte-
Maure and transmitted to Boccaccio and Chaucer. Heavily influ-
enced by Ovid, The Romance of the Rose (Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun) uses dreamlike allegory and sexual symbols of flower,
garden, and tower to chart love's assault. The pregnancy of the Rose
is a first for European literary heroines. Abelard wrote famous love
songs, now lost, to Heloise. Dante's youthful love poems to Beatrice
in the Vita nuova begin in troubadour style, then modulate toward
Christian mysticism. In the Inferno's episode of Paolo and Francesca,
seduced into adultery by reading a romance of Lancelot, Dante
renounces his early affection for courtly love. Medieval Latin lyrics
express homoerotic feeling between teacher and student in monastic
communities. There are overtly pederastic poems from the 12th
century and at least one apparently lesbian one, but no known
vernacular or pastoral medieval poetry is homosexual. The goliardic
Carmina Burana contain beautiful lyrics of the northern flowering of
spring and love, as well as cheeky verses of carousing and wenching,
some startlingly detailed. The French fabliau, a ribald verse-tale twice
imitated by Chaucer, reacts against courtly love with bedroom
pranks, barnyard drubbings, and an earthy stress on woman's hoary
genitality. Villon, zestfully atumble with Parisian trollops, will later
combine the devil-may-care goliard's pose with the fabliau's slangy
comedy.

Renaissance epic further expands the romantic element in chi-
valric adventure. Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso open quest to an
armed heroine, a motif adopted by Spenser, whose Faerie Queene,
emulating Ovid's Metamorphoses, copiously catalogues incidents of
normal and deviant sex. Petrarch, combining troubadour lyricism
with Dante's advanced psychology, creates the modern love poem.
His Laura, unlike saintly Beatrice, is a real woman, not a symbol.

ON LITERATURE AND ART

323

Petrarch's nature, vibrating to the lover's emotions, will become the
Romantic pathetic fallacy. His conceits, paradoxes, and images of
fire and ice, which spread in sonnet sequences throughout Europe,
inspired and burdened Renaissance poets, who had to discard the
convention of frigid mistress and trembling wooer. Ronsard's son-
nets, addressed to Cassandre, Marie, and Helene, first follow Pe-
trarchan formulas, then achieve a simpler, more musical, debonair
style, exquisitely attuned to nature. In the Amoretti Spenser practices
the sonnet (introduced to England by Wyatt and Surrey), but his
supreme love poem is the Epithalamion, celebrating marriage. Like
Michelangelo, Shakespeare writes complex love poetry to a beautiful
young man and a forceful woman: the fair youth's homoerotic an-
drogyny is reminiscent of Shakespeare's soft, "lovely" Adonis and
Marlowe's longhaired, white-fleshed Leander, romanced by Nep-
tune. Richard Barnfield's sonnets and Affectionate Shepherd openly
offer succulent sexual delights to a boy called Ganymede, a common
Renaissance allusion. The traditional allegory, based on the Song
of Songs, of Christ the bridegroom knocking at the soul's door,
creates unmistakable homoeroticism in Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV,
George Herbert's "Love (III)", and spiritual stanzas of St. John of
the Cross. In ardent poems to his fiancee, later his wife, Donne, with
Spenser, demonstrates the new prestige of marriage: before this, no
one wrote love poetry to his wife. Furthermore, Donne's erudition
implies that his lady, better educated than her medieval precursors,
enjoys flattery of her intellect as well as of her beauty. Aretino's
sonnets daringly use vulgar street terms for acts of love. Marino's
Adonis makes Baroque opera out of the ritualistic stages of sexual
gratification. Waller and Marvell use the carpe diem argument to lure
shy virgins into surrender; the Cavalier poets adopt a flippant court
attitude toward women and pleasure. Carew's A Rapture turns
Donne's ode to nakedness into a risque tour of Celia's nether parts.
Libertines emerge in the late 17th century: Rochester, a Restoration
wit, writes bluntly of raw couplings with ladies, whores, and boys.
Milton's Lycidas revives the classical style of homoerotic pastoral
lament. Paradise Lost, following Spenser and Donne, exalts "wedded
Love" over the sterile wantonness of "Harlots" and "Court Amours"
(4.750-70).

The Age of Reason, valuing self-control and witty detachment,

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

favored satire over love poetry. Rousseau's delicate sentiment and
pagan nature-worship created the fervent moods of "sensibility" and
woman-revering Romanticism. Goethe, identifying femaleness with
creativity, writes of happy sensual awakening in the Roman Elegies
and jokes about sodomy with both sexes in the Venetian Epigrams,
with its autocrotic acrobat, Bettina; withheld pornographic verses
imitate ancient priapeia. Schiller dedicates rhapsodic love poems to
Laura, but his hymns to womanhood sentimentally polarize the
sexes. Holderlin addresses Diotima with generalized reverence and
reserves his real feeling for Mother Earth. Blake calls for sexual
freedom for women and for the end of guilt and shame. Burns com-
poses rural Scottish ballads of bawdy or ill-starred love. Words-
worth's Lucy poems imagine woman reabsorbed into roiling nature.
In Christabel Coleridge stages a virgin's seduction by a lesbian vam-
pire, nature's emissary. The younger English Romantics fuse poetry
with free love. In Epipsychidion Shelley is ruled by celestial women
radiating intellectual light. Keats makes emotion primary; his maid-
ens sensuously feed and sleep or wildly dance dominion over knights
and kings. Byron's persona as a "mad, bad" seducer has been revised
by modern revelations about his bisexuality. In the "Thyrza" poems,
he woos and changes the sex of a favorite Cambridge choirboy; in
Don Juan, his blushing, girlish hero, forced into drag, catches the eye
of a tempestuous lesbian sultana. Heine's love ballads are about
squires, shepherd-boys, hussars, and fishermaidens; later verses re-
cord erotic adventures of the famous poet wined and dined by lady
admirers.

French Romantics, turning art against nature in the hell of the
modern city, make forbidden sex a central theme. Gautier celebrates
the lonely, self-complete hermaphrodite. Baudelaire looses brazen
whores upon syphilitic male martyrs; sex is torment, cursed by God.
Baudelaire's heroic, defiant lesbians are hedonistically modernized
by Verlaine and later rehellenized by Louys. In Femmes Verlaine
uses vigorous street argot to describe the voluptuous sounds and
smells of sex with women; in Hombres he lauds the brutal virility of
young laborers, whom he possesses in their rough workclothes. He
and Rimbaud co-wrote an ingenious sonnet about the anus. Mal-
larme's leering faun embodies pagan eros; cold, virginal Herodias
is woman as castrator. In contrast, Victorian poetry, as typified by

ON LITERATURE AND ART

325

the Brownings, exalts tenderness, fidelity, and devotion, the bonds
of married love, preserved beyond the grave. Tennyson and the Pre-
Raphaelites revive the medieval cult of idealized woman, supporting
the Victorian view of woman's spirituality. Tennyson's heroines, like
weary Mariana, love in mournful solitude. His Idylls retell Arthurian
romance. In Memoriam, Tennyson's elaborate elegy for Hallam, is
homoerotic in feeling. Rossetti's sirens are sultry, smoldering. Swin-
burne, inspired by Baudelaire, reintroduces sexual frankness into
highbrow English literature. His Dolores and Faustine are promis-
cuous femmes fatales, immortal vampires; his Sappho, sadistically ca-
ressing Anactoria, boldly proclaims her poetic greatness. Whitman
broke taboos in American poetry: he names body parts and depicts
sex surging through fertile nature; he savors the erotic beauties of
both male and female. Though he endorses sexual action and energy,
Whitman appears to have been mostly solitary, troubled by homo-
sexual desires, suggested in the "Calamus" section of Leaves of Grass.
Reflecting the Victorian taste for bereavement, Hardy's early poetry
features gloomy provincial tales of love lost: ghosts, graveyards,
suicides, tearful partings. Homoerotic Greek idealism and epicene
fin-de-siecle preciosity characterize the poems of Symonds, Carpenter,
Hopkins, Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. Renee Vivien, the first poet
to advertise her lesbianism, writes only of languid, ethereal beauty.

Love poetry of the twentieth century is the most varied and
sexually explicit since classical antiquity. T. S. Eliot diagnoses the
sexual sterility or passivity of modern man. Yet Neruda writes sear-
ing odes to physical passion, boiling with ecstatic elemental imagery.
D. H. Lawrence similarly roots the sex impulse in the seasonal cycles
of the animal world. Recalling long-ago, one-night pickups of hand-
some, athletic youths, Cavafy declares sex the creative source of his
poetry. For Yeats, woman's haunting beauty is the heart of life's
mystery; in "Leda and the Swan," rape is the metaphor for cata-
clysmic historical change. Rilke contemplates the philosophical di-
lemma of love, the pressure upon identity, the tension between fate
and freedom. Valery makes language erotic: the poet is Narcissus
and, in La Jeune Parque, the oracle raped by her own inner god.
Eluard sees woman erotically metamorphosing through the world,
permeating him with her supernatural force. Lorca imagines operatic
scenes of heterosexual seduction, rape, or mutilation and in "Ode

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to Walt Whitman" denounces urban "pansies" for a visionary homo-
sexuality grounded in living nature. Fascinated but repelled by strip-
pers and whores, Hart Crane records squalid homosexual encounters
in subway urinals. Amy Lowell vividly charts the works and days
of a settled, sustaining lesbian relationship, while H. D. projects
lesbian feeling into Greek personae, often male. Edna St. Vincent
Millay is the first woman poet to claim a man's sexual freedom: her
sassy, cynical lyrics of Jazz Age promiscuity with anonymous men
are balanced by melancholy love poems to women. Auden blurred
the genders in major poems to conceal their homosexual inspiration;
his private verse is maliciously bawdy. William Carlos Williams is
rare among modern poets in extolling married love and kitchen-
centered domestic bliss.

For Dylan Thomas, youth's sexual energies drive upward from
moldering, evergreen earth. Theodore Roethke presents woman as
unknowable Muse, ruling nature's ghostly breezes and oozy sexual
matrix. Delmore Schwartz hails Marilyn Monroe as a new Venus,
blessing and redeeming "a nation haunted by Puritanism." The free-
living Beats, emulating black hipster talk, broke poetic decorum
about sex. Adopting Whitman's chanting form and pansexual theme,
Allen Ginsberg playfully celebrates sodomy and master-slave sce-
narios. In "Marriage," Gregory Corso imagines the whole universe
wedding and propagating, while he ages destitute and alone. The
Confessional poets weave sex into autobiography. Robert Lowell lies
on his marriage bed paralyzed, sedated, unmanned. Anne Sexton
aggressively breaks the age-old taboo upon female speech by graph-
ically exploring her own body in adultery and masturbation. Sylvia
Plath launched contemporary feminist poetry with her sizzling ac-
counts of modern marriage as hell. With its grisly mix of Nazi fantasy
and Freudian family romance, "Daddy," after Yeats' "Leda," may
be the love poem of the century. John Berryman's Sonnets records a
passionate, adulterous affair with a new Laura, her platinum hair
lit by the dashboard as they copulate in a car, the modern version
of Dido's dark "cave." Love and Fame reviews Berryman's career as
a "sexual athlete" specializing in quickie encounters. The sexual
revolution of the 1960s heightened the new candor. Hippie poetry
invokes Buddhist avatars for love's ecstasies. Denise Levertov and
Carol Berge reverse tradition by salaciously detailing the hairy, mus-

ON LITERATURE AND ART

32V

cular male body. Diane di Prima finds sharp, fierce imagery for the
violent carnality of sex. Charles Bukowski writes of eroticism without
illusions in a tough, gritty world of scrappy women, drunks, room-
inghouses, and racetracks. Mark Strand mythically sees man help-
lessly passed from mother to wife to daughter: "I am the toy of
women."

The 1960s also freed gay poetry from both underground and
coterie. James Merrill, remembering mature love or youthful crisis,
makes precise, discreet notations of dramatic place and time. Paul
Goodman, Robert Duncan, Frank O'Hara, Thorn Gunn, Harold
Norse, and Mutsuo Takahashi intricately document the mechanics
of homosexual contact for the first time since Imperial Rome: cruis-
ing, hustlers, sailors, bodybuilders, bikers, leather bars, bus termi-
nals, toilets, glory holes. Gay male poetry is about energy, adventure,
quest, danger, beauty and pleasure amidst secrecy, shame, and pain.
Lesbian poetry, in contrast, prefers tender, committed relationships
and often burdens itself with moralistic political messages. Adrienne
Rich and Judy Grahn describe intimate lesbian sex and express
solidarity with victimized women of all social classes; Audre Lorde
invokes African myths to enlarge female identity. Olga Broumas,
linking dreamy sensation to Greek sun and sea, has produced the
most artistically erotic lesbian lyrics. Eleanor Lerman's Armed Love,
with its intellectual force and hallucinatory sexual ambiguities, re-
mains the leading achievement of modern lesbian poetry, recapit-
ulating the tormented history of Western love from Sappho and
Catullus to Baudelaire.

TOURNAMENT OF

MODERN PERSONAE:
D. H. LAWRENCE'S
WOMEN IN LOVE

The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are
Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical
liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images
of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students
in the Sixties. Yet the voluminous and complex works of both men
were swept away by the current women's movement, when it burst
out in the late Sixties and consolidated its ideology in the Seventies.
Whatever their motives, the first feminist theorists acted as vandals
and Bolsheviks. The damage they did to culture has in the long run
damaged the cause of feminism.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, a diluted and censored
version of Freud began to dribble back into academic feminism from
two directions, one French Lacanian and the other American psy-
chiatric, but it remains the case that very little Freud. is directly read
in women's studies and that a majority of feminists, in and out of
academe, are hostile to Freud and refer to him with cheap derision.
The situation with Lawrence is even more extreme. As far as wom-
en's studies is concerned, he has ceased to exist. A horde of minor,
politically correct women writers has replaced him in the curriculum.

Many of our most talented women students are graduating from
college without having read not only Freud and Lawrence but other

32a

ON LITERATURE AND ART

329

major figures like Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Norman
Mailer. An embarrassed student recently asked me hesitantly
whether I permitted papers to be submitted on Hemingway. When
I enthusiastically assented, she said she had hidden her interest in
Hemingway for years and that close friends at once-distinguished
Vassar College were viciously negative about him — without, of
course, ever having read him. This is scandalous. Hemingway vir-
tually invented modern American prose, the lingua franca of jour-
nalism; his style develops and strengthens you as a writer. What
have we done to young women in the name of feminism?

In my original projection, the first volume of Sexual Personae was
to end with Lawrence and Woolf. The latter material was contained
in a mammoth 160-page seminar paper, "Male and Female in Vir-
ginia Woolf," which I obsessively produced for my last graduate
seminar at Yale in 1970. But the Woolf boom in feminism happened
shortly afterward and sent many a Woolf admirer running for the
hills. As for Lawrence, the abundant Anglo-American literary crit-
icism on his work was already excellent. There was no need for the
kind of sexual rescue operation that I eventually performed, for
example, on the admired but defanged Emily Dickinson.

Times have changed. Twenty-five years later, theory has sup-
planted literature, and criticism has degenerated into moralistic text-
trashing. Those who love Lawrence, or any of the other ritually
abused dead white males, must speak. I will focus here on Women
in Love (1920), one of my book of books and a key to my sensibility.
When I first read it in 1969, it seemed thin, tinny, strange, but it
began to work on me subtly and became a profound influence on
my thinking as I was designing Sexual Personae.

The most startling effect was that Women in Love collapsed in
my mind with Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590), which I
was studying at the time and which was suffering from a grotesquely
sanctimonious criticism of paralyzing dullness. Two authors more
apparently dissimilar than Spenser and Lawrence could scarcely be
imagined. But the representational style and sexual vision of their
major works seemed parallel to me. Iconography and epiphany: In
Women in Love, as in The Faerie Queene, aggressive, highly ornamented
personalities burst on the eye in quick passages of ritual combat.
Sex seems to ebb and flow in manic peaks and velvety lows of sadism

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and masochism, an oscillation of violent energy and torpid self-
obliteration.

Women in Love, with its poetic language, mythic archetypes, and
eerie occultism, is more a Romantic than a modernist or realist novel.
Its theme is both nature and culture — the primal Dionysian forces
within us and the rational Apollonian structures we have devised
against our chaos. Each principle is shown moving toward its point
of excess: the Dionysian spinning into barbarism and the Apollonian
hardening into fascism.

Partly because of his proletarian roots, Lawrence is hypersen-
sitive to social class and documents working-class experience without
sentimentalizing it. Contemptuous of bourgeois niceties, he is con-
scious of his complicity, as a writer, with middle-class experience.
Wealth and aristocracy appear in his work as artifice and manner-
ism, a glamourous imprisonment of mind and body. Hermione
Roddice, the eccentric, somnambulistic socialite based on Lady
Ottoline Morrell, is his most extravagant example of class as burden
and destiny.

Women in Love analyzes industrial capitalism with harsh Blakean
metaphors that dissolve the psychological into the economic. Greed
and lust fuse, as in The Faerie Queene's catalog of deranged appetites.
A coal magnate, Gerald Crich, is Lawrence's incarnation of the
European will to power; he is an idolator of the machine and of a
rapacious phallicism. Exploitation is dissected as a dynamic of com-
pulsive, self-consuming desire. The novel contains a far subtler and
more revolutionary critique of Western sexuality than anything in
academic feminism or poststructuralism. Rupert Birkin, its brood-
ing, author-identified protagonist, is a nonconforming male, pale
and sensitive, who seeks sensory modes of knowledge outside the
iron frame of the West's imperialistic abstractions.

Lawrence sees the social spectacle with more completeness than
do the usual glum puritans of the Marxist school. Only Arnold
Hauser, in his vast Marxist masterwork, The Social History of Art, has
integrated aesthetic values with class analysis as successfully as Law-
rence in Women in Love. Fashion here is as signficant as economics.
Body language, costume, speech, artistic tastes: for Lawrence, cul-
ture is a public theater of symbolic action.

In Women in Love, anthropology is a subset to zoology. Lawrence's

ON LITERATURE AND ART

33 1

radical new perspective introduces to the genre of the social novel
Sadean and Darwinian perceptions about the continuum of human-
ity with the animal world. In her lavish getups of velvets and feathers,
Hermione seems like a gigantic partridge on the prowl. The Brang-
wen sisters' yellow, rose, and emerald-green stockings are emblem-
atic, in the Spenserian sense, and also sexually coded, the paradings
of provocative mating display, appreciatively registered by men in
the street. For Lawrence, society is a carnival of the animals. Instinct
drives us in ways philosophy fails to acknowledge and science still
cannot fully explain.

Women in Love is structured by a series of close encounters with
animals, objects, persons, even plants. There are chattering canaries,
a drowsy lap dog, a bullying tomcat, a terrified, rearing horse, and
a "great lusty rabbit'' who, "magically strong," goes wild in Gud-
run's grasp. In a brilliantly original scene, bizarre, impressive, and
ludicrous all at once, Gudrun taunts a herd of long-horned cattle
with "palpitating" eurhythmic exercises, avant-garde and yet ar-
chaic, a modern bull-dancing. 1

Goaded beyond endurance by Birkin's officious preaching, Her-
mione smashes at his skull with an oppressively vivid lapis lazuli
paperweight, the blows falling with hypnotic slowness. Fleeing to
the woods, Birkin purifies himself by rolling naked in the wet grass
and stinging his flesh with sharp boughs and needles. The tactile
sensuality of his ravishing embrace of vegetable nature is rivaled in
Romantic literature only by cardinal passages in Keats, Whitman,
and Christina Rossetti. Like Rousseau, Birkin escapes from mankind
to wed himself to his origins.

Later, the emotion is reversed: rebelling against the omnipotence
of woman, symbolized by the Magna Mater, Birkin crazily attacks
and shatters the moon's reflection in a pond. But the "heaving,
rocking, dancing" fragments magnetically rejoin; the "luminous
polyp," with its "arms of fire," inexorably recovers and triumphs,
mocking man's pretensions and conceit. 2 Lawrence's precursors in
the dazzling execution of this savage scene, with its uncanny lu-
minescence and dark psychic turbulence, are Coleridge and Melville,
visionaries of uncontrollable nature.

While the close encounters of Women in Love are all highly rit-
ualistic, those with objets d'art are overtly cultic. The novel has

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three sculptures, each representing a major region of the world. The
first, a wood-carving from the West Pacific, is of a naked woman
crouching in the agonies of childbirth. The "transfixed, rudimen-
tary" face suggests "the extreme of physical sensation beyond the
limits of mental consciousness. " In the chapter called "Totem,"
Birkin defends the statue to a "shocked, resentful" Gerald, who
denies it can be art. 3 This is the period when Picasso's generation
of artists in Paris was being influenced by non-Western tribal arti-
facts.

The second sculpture is a "tall, slim, elegant figure from West
Africa in dark wood, glossy and suave." Contemplating its "crushed
tiny" face and heavy "protuberant buttocks," Birkin realizes that
there are "great mysteries to be unsealed," expressing something
"far beyond any phallic knowledge, sensual subtle realities far be-
yond the scope of phallic investigation." 4 Lawrence sees the human
body in holistic or yogic terms: energy is released or blocked by
cultural assumptions. Each organ or muscle group has symbolic
corollaries and is a source of special insight. Women in Love, in a
manner too easily ridiculed, is full of lush references to "loins," the
complex pelvic area that Lawrence rightly sees as withered and
demeaned in the West.

The third sculpture, a bronze statuette by a cynical, troll-like
Austrian artist, is of a small, naked adolescent girl perched on a
massive, "rigid," straining stallion, her legs dangling "pathetically"
and "childishly." 5 Whereas the Oceanic and African sculptures show
woman sacred and solitary, paradoxically dominating through her
passive experience of brute nature, the European art work is pred-
icated on a misunderstanding of sexual physics. Masochistically de-
pendent, the woman has surrendered her mythological power to the
male, who becomes a tyrannous phallic fetish. Lawrence is sug-
gesting that when woman rejects her special intimacy with natural
process, she trivializes and diminishes herself and guarantees male
hegemony. This difficult lesson has yet to be learned by contem-
porary feminism.

Lawrence's use of the close-encounter format in Women in Love
is almost masquelike, as in the episodic vignettes of The Faerie Queene.
The plot is literally a process of looking for meaning, as life offers
random experiences and frustrations. Things appear and disappear,

ON LITERATURE AND ART

333

after highly charged confrontations and conflicts. Momentary rev-
elations explode at Lawrence's characters in ways their Western
mental categories can't quite contain or order. The effect is almost
elemental, like squalls, cloudbursts. Indeed, the baffling frenzy of
the rabbit is described as a "black-and-white tempest," a "thun-
derstorm." 6

One of Lawrence's major insights, a basic principle of Hinduism
and Zen Buddhism, is that words cannot possibly correspond to or
fully convey ultimate truths about life or the universe. By rhythmic
repetition, surreal imagery, and heightened, operatic phrasings,
Lawrence uses language to break through language in ways far
beyond French poststructuralism, with its bourgeois pendantry and
preciosity. The characters of Women in Love struggle toward under-
standing, their rational and verbal resources overwhelmed by the
influx of unsorted sensory data and by eruptions of amoral uncon-
scious impulses.

"Water-Party," a chapter that is nearly a self-contained Noh
play, stunningly illustrates Lawrence's technique of illumination
through disintegration. As darkness falls, strings of paper lanterns,
like "ruddy creatures of fire," hover on boats over the lake. The
scene is exquisitely beautiful. Birkin, with his usual mix of the or-
acular and the pompous, is discoursing to Ursula Brangwen about
"the silver river of life" versus "the black river" of dissolution, "our
real reality": Aphrodite represents not just love and sex but "the
flowing mystery of the death-process." Myths are alive, changing
as we change.

As Birkin and Gerald warily court Ursula and Gudrun, the
tranquil mood of tingling erotic expectancy is suddenly shattered by
"a confusion of shouting" and churning water across the lake. What
has happened? To whom? How? Fear, helplessness, uncertainty, as
the lovers, rushing to help, seem as frail as the glowing lanterns.
Through the darkness come snatches of broken speech and a girl's
shriek, almost like a stammer: "Di — Di — Di — Di!" Gerald's teen-
aged sister Diana, heedlessly dancing on the roof of a party cruiser,
has gone into the water; her rescuer, a young doctor, has not re-
surfaced.

Shortly afterward, numbed by futile dives into the icy water,
Gerald sits "black and motionless," "his head blunt and blind like

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a seal's, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing." He is defeated.
Even the most imperious will is rebuffed by material limitation. The
unknown world is always greater than the known. The entire episode
is a paradigm of the novel as a whole, which endorses descents to
levels of experience too remote for articulation. Beyond the heaving
foreground of human agitation stretches the infuriating calmness of
nature, blank and indifferent.

The lake's sluice-gate is opened; all night the "terrible crushing
boom" of the water goes on, like the roar Wordsworth hears above
the clouds on Mount Snowdon. Near dawn, the bodies are found:
"Diana had her arms tight round the neck of the young man, choking
him. 'She killed him,' said Gerald." Such refusal to sentimentalize
is one of the most startling qualities of Women in Love. Birkin too
says, even before the lake is drained, "What does it matter if Diana
Crich is alive or dead?" 7 Gudrun is shocked, but Birkin's curtness
is a philosophical detachment like Mrs. Moore's stern withdrawal
in Forster's A Passage to India, where Western and Far Eastern con-
ceptual categories clash after a mysterious occurrence in the heart
of nature.

Like Freud, Lawrence strips away the false frills of Victorianism,
the lugubrious pieties of institutionalized humanitarianism, which
have sprung to renewed life in our own time. Because he has no
illusions about our innate altruism, Lawrence is a keen analyst of
criminality, which, again like Freud, he sees simmering in all ap-
parently civilized people. In a typical conversation in Women in Love,
jolts and surges of hostility and aggression go on just beneath the
surface. The subtext is far more primitive than in Henry James,
since Lawrence has taken our unruly carnality into the purview of
his fiction. Sexual attraction is shown as an unstable complex of
love-hate, a war for individuality and survival.

Lawrence's descriptions of criminal violence arising out of or-
dinary events — sex-tinged attempted murders by Hermione and
Gerald — are chilling and compelling, in the tradition of Poe and
Dostoyevsky. They were pivotal to my understanding of the psy-
chopathology of rape, which mainstream feminism has reduced to
naive, simplistic formulas. A superb example of Lawrence's com-
mand of the subliminal is the rabbit scene, where Gudrun's arm is
scratched: seeing the "deep red score down the silken white flesh,"

ON LITERATURE AND ART

335

"the long red rent of her forearm," Gerald absorbs the wound in
erotic terms, as in the dream process or the metaphor-making poetic
mind. 8 Lawrence constantly shows the mutuality and complicity of
sexual response on the nonverbal level — precisely what is missing
from the current clumsy date-rape discourse.

Though he has a reputation as a misogynist, Lawrence's picture
of modern sexual relations is highly accurate. Like Blake, he shows
the difficulty of heterosexuality, the anxieties men suffer as they try
to escape the shadow of their mothers, who rule their lives in ways
most feminists fail to see. To what degree should men obey or defy
women? How far can a man develop himself emotionally before
losing the respect of other men? What is masculinity for middle-
class men divorced from the daily labor of their forefathers? How
much of sexual desire comes from nature, how much from culture?
Who is our ideal mate? Should love challenge us or put our questions
to sleep?

The episode in which Gerald, haunted by the ugly death of his
ailing father, tramps through muddy fields to invade Gudrun's bed-
chamber should be basic reading for every student of sex. Yearning,
coercion, and lust intermingle, as in life itself. What do men want
from women? It's all here. Gerald's convulsive orgasm exorcises his
anguish and tension — but at the cost of infantilization. Ironically,
his phallicism makes woman a goddess and him a "child." 9

Lawrence shows the unstable dynamic in heterosexuality, which
swings man from conqueror to slave in the drama of arousal. Sat-
isfied, Gerald sinks into delicious, healing sleep, like an infant "at
its mother's breast," but Gudrun "lay wide awake, destroyed into
perfect consciousness" — one of the novel's most terrible moments.
It is a brutal modern version of Botticelli's Venus and Mars, borrowed
by Spenser for a pornographic vampire scene of The Faerie Queene.
Spenser, Blake, and Lawrence all show fallen sexuality as a cruel
cycle of dominance and submission, where male power and male
neediness are identical and where woman drinks man's energy as
he spills it.

Throughout Women in Love, an unmistakable emotional and sex-
ual attraction crackles between bookish Birkin and macho blonde
Gerald. In the chapter called "Gladiatorial," the two lock themselves
in a room and wrestle in the nude, their bodies amorously inter-

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twined, till one collapses half-conscious on the other. They clasp
hands, compliment each other's physical "beauty, " and share a
whiskey and soda.

We are in a period where homoeroticism of this kind is auto-
matically interpreted as homosexuality, which I think is wrong.
Birkin seeks "Bruderschajl," blood-brotherhood with a male, a desire
so significant that Lawrence ends the novel with it. After Gerald is
found frozen to death in the snow (an Apollonian ice-sculpture, the
novel's fourth objet d'art), Birkin tells Ursula that she is "all women"
to him, his eternal mate, but he wanted "eternal union with a man
too." Ursula, piqued, insists he can't have "two kinds of love." 10
Like A Passage to India, the novel ends with union between men
defeated.

Despite the bisexual implications in Women in Love, I am skeptical
about whether Lawrence would endorse full sexual relations between
men. Surely, erections are missing from the wrestling episode, as
part of the novel's questioning of phallicism. Western athleticism,
which still overwhelmingly centers on the pitting of male against
male, may be a structured positioning of homoeroticism in culture.
That is, it is not a concealed or displaced homosexuality; instead,
homosexuality may be a ritualized compromise for a Bruderschqft not
otherwise obtainable. Though both The Rainbow and Women in Love
(its sequel) explicitly address male fear of woman, Lawrence suggests
that woman must be dealt with in all her natural power. Those who
do less have narrowed their vision.

Lawrence was writing at a sea-change in sexual history. Gudrun
Brangwen is a new kind of woman, confrontational and demanding;
her speech is nervy, abrupt, and exclamatory. Seventy-five years
later, it still sounds fresh and contemporary. The slow, majestic
Hermione Roddice, with her aesthetical ambitions, remains the
grand lady, bridging the period between Henry James and Blooms-
bury. Virginia Woolf, for example, despite her feminist ideals, pro-
jected a public persona closer to Hermione than to Gudrun. As a
woman, Gudrun shatters tradition and decorum; exuding aggressive
sexual energy, she wields her sarcasm like a weapon.

When I first read Women in Love, I was drawn to Gudrun and
resented the way Lawrence treats her as a foil to Ursula, whose
serene, patient, self-effacing motherliness toward men seemed like

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337

everything my generation was rebelling against. Over time, however,
the enduring truth in the contrast of sisters became clear. I used to
be troubled by Lawrence's belittling remarks about feminists, whom
his collected works portray as shrill, humorless, and desexed.

I now realize that Lawrence was accurately recording the fa-
naticism of a political movement in its late phase. The major thrust
of nineteenth-century feminism was winning women the right to vote,
which was achieved, in nation after nation in Europe and North
America, in the early twentieth century. But major innovations,
including the birth of artistic modernism, psychoanalysis, and Hol-
lywood, were also changing attitudes and behavior and, in fact,
overtook feminism and passed it. The sexual revolution of the Twen-
ties was not produced by feminism. On the contrary, aside from
Margaret Sanger's controversial birth-control movement (coura-
geously supported by Katharine Hepburn's parents), too much fem-
inist energy was diverted to moral-welfare causes such as the drive
to ban liquor and prostitution. Fourteen years of Prohibition, and
the spread of organized crime, were the result.

Lawrence's caricatures of feminists seem realistic again, since
the current reborn women's movement similarly veered toward fa-
naticism, not just among the anti-pornography and anti-beauty ideo-
logues (today's Carry Nations) but among mainstream activists
whose obsession with feminist rhetoric has supplanted all larger
philosophical or cultural concerns. I now recognize in the dissatis-
fied, word-obsessed Gudrun Brangwen the bright, perfect, brittle,
overcontrolled women careerists of the legal, corporate, and aca-
demic worlds who have risen to prominence in the last twenty years
and who coolly schedule their delayed pregnancies and professional
childcare by time clock. Their destined mate is Gerald Crich, the
ultimate capitalist manager, patron of the body reduced to a ma-
chine.

At a time when gender theory follows either strict social con-
structionism or a sentimental cult of benevolent nature, Lawrence's
insights are of utmost importance. He sees humanity as unevolved,
our ideals in daily conflict with animal urges we wrongly ignore or
denigrate. Inspired by Frazer's epic prose-poem, The Golden Bough,
Lawrence wants to recover our sense of primal mysteries, long lost
in the West. He protests against the tyranny of abstractions, a prod-

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uct not only of reactionary institutions but of bourgeois liberal ide-
ology.

Lawrence's importance for the Sixties was not just as a prophet
of sex but as an expander of consciousness. For him, love in the
Western sense is not enough; he would reject today's idolatry of
"relationships" as parochial and limiting. As a Romantic, he exalts
profound understanding over politics. In Women in Love, modern
personalities clash in the new arena of sex, their words splintering
and smashing like the lances of Spenser's knights. At the end of the
century, the sexes are still at war. But there is a dawning sense that
we must look back to nature to find out who we are.

1. Women in Love (New York, 1960), pp. 232, 159.

2. Pp. 239-40.

3. Pp. 67, 71.

4. P. 45.

5. Pp. 419-20.

6. P. 232.

7. Pp. 164, 181, 177.

8. Pp. 234-35.

9. Pp. 337-38.
10. Pp. 472-73.

BREVIARY OF THE NUDE:
KENNETH CLARK'S THE NUDE

One of the most influential books of my career was Kenneth
Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Published in 1956, it was an
expanded version of the six A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
that Clark gave three years earlier at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C.

My paperback edition of The Nude, small and compact as a
breviary and tinted a cool blue-gray, is inscribed "1971." It was my
third year of graduate school at Yale, and I was in the process of
writing my doctoral dissertation, called Sexual Personae. I was scour-
ing the great collections of Sterling Library, looking for ways to
break through the academic disciplines, which had become too nar-
row and restricting. Revolutionary synthesis was needed.

The Nude came into my hands at a time when the most shrewdly
ambitious graduate students were drifting toward Paul de Man,
Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, all of whom struck me as colossally
uninteresting. In this, his greatest book by far, Kenneth Clark shows
the broad learning, cultivation, emotional engagement, and passion
for detail that are completely missing from the muddy maze-makers
of soggy, foggy poststructuralism.

[Times Higher Education Supplement, London, December 10, 1993]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Boldly crossing 2,500 years of Western art, Clark assimilates
and reorganizes an astounding wealth of material about the repre-
sentation of the male and female figure. He avoids the convenient
format of strict chronology and creates, in the core of the book,
a brilliant series of meditations: "Apollo," "Venus," "Energy,"
"Pathos," "Ecstasy."

The Nude teaches us how to see. Anyone who has studied its 298
ravishing illustrations and been guided by Clark's elegant, nuanced
prose will be blessedly impervious to current feminist cant about
"the male gaze" — that puritanical superstition cooked up by ideo-
logues with no instinct for art. Clark's interpretative style is simul-
taneously deeply sensual and crisply intellectual. Few scholarly
books have so successfully combined seduction and instruction.

Clark's categories of the Crystalline and Vegetable Aphrodites,
partly inspired by Plato, impressed me immediately, and I used
them to analyze everything from Spenser's Faerie Queene to Holly-
wood movie queens. Body type and personality are naturally and
theatrically related, though you would never know it from today's
slag-heaps of bombastic, Foucault-inspired rubbish that predicate
the body as passive to a lumpish something called "power."

Like Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, The Nude melts
the images and objects of culture into a strange, majestic dream, an
epic landscape of the mind. The ancient and archaic come alive, or
rather they prove they were never dead. In sharp, striking phrases,
Clark reanimates academic discourse: the Venus de Milo is like "an
elm tree in a field of corn"; the hand of Ingres's Thetis is "half
octopus, half tropical flower"; Michelangelo's nude Sistine youths
are "high-strung to the point of hysteria."

If ever I was in love with a book, it was with this one. The Nude
taught me how to lure and jab, refine and condense, dispatch and
recall. It has its weaknesses, notably in Asian and abstract art. But
Kenneth Clark's masterwork is a monumental achievement, mar-
rying connoisscurship to historicism.

THE ARTISTIC DYNAMICS OF
"REVIVAL."

The Modern Review faxed Camille Paglia to ask whether she had anything
to say on the subject of revivals.

Thank you for your inquiry about ' Revivals" in cultural history.
It is certainly revealing about the sorry state of Anglo-American
intellectual life that this question — one of the most interesting yet
posed to me since the publication four years ago of Sexual Personae —
has issued not from any university faculty or scholarly journal but
from The Modern Review.

Today's trendy theorists, with their jargon-infested, choke-a-
horse style, are incapable of dealing with this issue, since they have
foolishly committed their careers to the passe poststructuralist hy-
pothesis that history is fragmented and meaningless and knowledge
futile. The last major work animated by that idea was Waiting for
Godot, by Foucault's idol, Samuel Beckett, who no longer speaks for
anyone but morose somnambules like Susan Sontag. Since Godot,
popular culture has exploded onto the world stage and, by its titanic
assertions and vulgar vitality, shattered all the effete, elitist as-
sumptions of literary modernism.

[The Modern Review, London, March 1994]

341

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

From childhood, when I became obsessed with the twin pagan
phenomena of Hollywood and ancient Egypt, I have been passion-
ately convinced of the continuity of Western civilization, which rises
and falls with strange, haunting regularity. Recovery and revival
seem built into our mental system. In "Junk Bonds and Corporate
Raiders," I rejected the currently fashionable faith in the relativity
and therefore nullity of value judgments in canon-formation: "The
mythic pattern of Western culture is Greek revival: again and again,
objects are lost and refound, overvalued, devalued, then revalued.
But the classics always remain." Our rich popular culture, with
its speeded-up revivals, has simply inherited the deep structure of
classicism.

Throughout the sterile era of French theory, I clung to my belief
in the great narratives of cultural history and the periodicity and
organicism of artistic style. My influences here were, first, Vico,
Spengler, and Yeats, whose vision of cataclysmic 2,000-year cycles
was drawn from pagan astrology, of which I was a Sixties convert.
Second, Mircea Eliade, who examined the motif of recurrence, or
the "eternal return," in world religion.

Third, Heinrich Wolfflin, whose analysis of early, high, and late
styles in painting beautifully applied, I immediately saw, to the
career of the Beatles, from the rough vigor of "Boys" and "Chains,"
through the shapely perfection of "Day Tripper" and "Ticket to
Ride," to the disintegrating sophistication of the studio-bound Sgt.
Pepper and "White Album." At the end of that tripartite pattern,
major artists revolt, resimplify, and return to the start, as we see
with Donatello and Picasso, as with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and
David Bowie. We are all waiting, with some impatience, for Ma-
donna to get around to this. Ever since she shucked her brash,
streetwise, disco-tart persona, out of which she made her best mu-
sic, her career has been built entirely on revivals, from Monroe to
Dietrich.

Postmodernism's mingy synthetic substitute for revival is "ap-
propriation," which usually means an artist of limited talent jum-
bling together, without insight, ironic references to great works of
the past. I despise it, since I admire grandeur and expressiveness,
whether in Bernini's revival of imperial Roman style; the marmoreal,
neoclassic Federal architecture of Washington, D.C.; the ersatz Ox-

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bridge Gothic spires of Yale; or Great Britain's extraordinary blues
revival of the Sixties, which brought back to American shores, via
the Rolling Stones, a raised consciousness about our black musical
heritage.

Appropriation and pastiche are misconceived notions, promul-
gated by English-department drones with no sense of history. In
point of fact, we belong to an Alexandrian age of syncretism, in
which multicultural allusions fuse to make eccentric new wholes. I
call our time decadent — but in Sexual Personae I argued that deca-
dence is a complex historical mode, a thrilling, sensationalistic late
phase of culture dominated by themes of sex and violence. In deca-
dence, the major revival is of the primitive, which is juxtaposed with
the supersophisticated. We see this pattern in Nero's cruel banquets,
in Swinburne's poetry, and in the recent popularity of sadomaso-
chistic regalia and tribal body-piercing. "Archaizing" — a term used
by scholars of classical art — is infinitely preferable to the snide,
competitive, destructive "appropriation." Archaizing is still rever-
ent; it stitches the present to the past; it says nothing is ever lost.

Popular culture is a splendid laboratory to study the artistic
dynamics of revival. Paradoxically, it forces a reassessment of high
culture at a moment when we are crushing the heads of the serpents
of theory. To consider influence and tradition brings one back to
the canon, which is simply the body of work that other artists — not
just critics and professors — consider the touchstone for creation and
innovation. When Lenny Kravitz does his florid homage to the bril-
liant Jimi Hendrix, we see canon-formation in action, which all the
gripes of generic Nineties grunge bands cannot stop. Revival means
the dawning recognition of a timeless element in a work or style that
seemed dated, confined to, and limited by a particular period. There-
fore revival is crucial to the process of defining greatness in art, a
responsibility shirked by too many of the lightweight luminaries of
current academe.

SONTAG, BLOODY SONTAG

When I was in junior high school, Women's Day magazine, to
which my mother subscribed, published a satirical memoir of a
woman's disconcerting chance encounters with several famous peo-
ple. My favorite was her adventure in a ladies room with Tallulah
Bankhead, who mistook her for an old friend and delivered a long
monologue from inside the toilet stall. A cartoon showed a fur-clad
Tallulah hanging over the saloonlike swinging door and gesturing
languidly at the stunned but fascinated writer, who never did get a
word in edgewise.

I guess Susan Sontag is my Tallulah. The paperback edition of
Sontag's first essay collection, Against Interpretation, appeared in 1967,
while I was in college. It was among a dozen books that defined the
cultural moment and seemed to herald a dawning age of revolu-
tionary achievement, by students of the Sixties as well as by Sontag
herself. Unfortunately, things did not turn out that way, and we're
still trying to figure out why. Sixties thinkers lacked staying power.
Like the Romantics, they seemed to spend themselves with their
early efforts.

Against Interpretation was the high point of Sontag's reputation.
Its importance at the time was its constellation of subjects: literature,
film, theater, philosophy, anthropology; the artistic avant-garde

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(happenings); the sexual avant-garde (camp, drag). Son tag was
learned yet anti-academic. Her essays, accessible to an educated
general audience, helped to break the stranglehold that the over-
professionalized universities had on "serious" thought in America.
The glamourous dust-jacket photo imprinted Sontag's sexual per-
sona as a new kind of woman writer so indelibly on the mind that
the image still lingers, wraithlike, and makes criticism of her very
difficult. She was the dream date of bookish men and the chic
Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows alter ego of educated but genteel, white,
middle-class women, the latter of whom emerged as and remain
(surely not to her satisfaction) her primary audience.

I admired Against Interpretation for three reasons. First, it dis-
solved the disciplines in a way that was crucial for the future of
intellectual life in America. As a college student, I fiercely opposed
the rigid departmentalization and overspecialization of academe.
Since she had been pursuing graduate work in philosophy and com-
parative religion, I expected Sontag would soon turn her attention
to the American university and use her sophisticated rhetorical skills
against it. But when her dissertation did not materialize, she drifted
from academe and affected snobbish scorn for it without trying to
change it.

As happened to the scintillating Germaine Greer, Sontag's sep-
aration from the university weakened her work over the long haul.
The discipline of academic scholarship can kill and deaden but also
refine and strengthen major talents of Greer's and Sontag's dimen-
sion. Harold Bloom scribbled in the margin of a draft of my disser-
tation in 1971, "Mere Sontagisme!" It saddened me, but I knew
Bloom was right. Sontag, who should have been Jane Harrison's
successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous
with a shallow kind of hip posturing.

Reexamining Sontag's work for passages to cite in my disser-
tation, I was dismayed and frustrated. There was a line-by-line
evasiveness in the same essays that had seemed so stimulating in
college. I found no argument, only collage. Many of the generali-
zations or rapid-fire summaries now seemed, on the basis of my
further study, questionable. Sontag seemed more and more a literary
journalist rather than a philosopher or intellectual. But this was a
period when first-person journalism was a performance art: I was

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avidly following the media adventures of Norman Mailer, Gore
Vidal, and Jill Johnston.

The second reason I admired Against Interpretation in college was
its frank interest in popular culture, with which I had been obsessed
since childhood. I had never made the slightest distinction of value
between the brilliant images of classical art and archaeology and
those of Hollywood, television, advertisements, and pop music. What
I thought I saw in Sontag was a fellow pop devotee, someone equally
determined to smash the false dichotomy between high and low art.
Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster," a deep-structure analysis
of science-fiction films, remains one of the best things ever written
about popular culture. It is required reading in my "Mass Media"
courses. This lucid, funny, ingenious piece should have started an
entire school of pop criticism. Alas, academic commentary on pop-
ular culture lurched in another direction and ended up deep in the
postmodernist morass. It is surprisingly difficult to find lively, ac-
cessible, jargon-free readings in popular culture to assign to under-
graduates. "The Imagination of Disaster," in content and form, is
an excellent model for speculative student essays.

Unfortunately, Sontag herself abandoned what she had started.
Defending pop culture was highly controversial at that time. One
could not be taken seriously as a thinker if one's remarks jumped
so easily into hot copy in the glossy magazines. Sontag buckled under
the abuse. She began to distance herself not only from pop but from
American culture itself. Saturnine European writers — mostly
male — soon dominated her work. Sontag made herself the hand-
maiden of esoteric theory. At first her championing of Roland
Barthes kept her ahead of academe, then in the doldrums of late
New Criticism. But poststructuralist theory became a global industry
in the Seventies and made Sontag irrelevant. Her career as a cutting-
edge commentator and tastemaker has never recovered.

Sontag's calculated veering away from popular culture is my
gravest charge against her. When in a 1988 profile in Time magazine,
she denied she had ever been that interested in pop ("It isn't as if
I wrote an essay on the Supremes") and boasted that she did not
even own a television set, I was appalled and disgusted. 1 Not having
a TV is tantamount to saying, "I know nothing of the time or country
in which I live." Television is America, and year by year it is be-

ON LITERATURE AND ART

34*7

coming the world. Sontag's betrayal of pop, to one who has never
lost the faith, is unforgivable, since as a graduate student and young
teacher, I shoved my pop acolytism down people's throats and took
the career hit for it.

The third reason I admired Against Interpretation was simply for
its public theater, its thrilling debut of an au courant woman intel-
lectual. As an adolescent, I had fixed on Dorothy Parker and Mary
McCarthy as the only available female role models in the literary
life. I loved their tough realism, bare-knuckles pugnacity, and witty
malice. Like my idols Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, they
had the feminist freedom and adventurous cosmopolitanism of the
Thirties. Women in the placid, boy-chasing Debbie Reynolds/San-
dra Dee era seemed bland and timorous. As for Simone de Beauvoir,
whom I admired enormously after reading The Second Sex in 1963,
her rigorous intellectuality did not allow for humor or the irrational,
and her world was sternly pre-pop. With Against Interpretation, Sontag
revived and modernized the woman of letters.

The Romantic ideals of individualism and freedom that inspired
Sixties political protest also energized women to take their place on
the cultural stage. When the women's movement became a national
force late in the decade, that individualism began to be redefined in
narrowly feminist terms. Here is where Sontag, as the nation's pre-
miere woman intellectual, could and should have played a leading
role. In 1972 she wrote a sensible article on women and aging that
implicitly acknowledged the new feminist agenda but then pulled
back, perhaps because of a mandarin disdain for the increasing
vulgarity and (as she put it in a withering 1975 exchange with
Adrienne Rich) "anti-intellectualism" of feminist rhetoric. Ironi-
cally, this was precisely when her infatuations began with European
male writers — who seem to be substitutes for the lost father figure
she admits she has always mourned.

Sontag's cool self-exile was a disaster for the American women's
movement. Only a woman of her prestige could have performed the
necessary critique and debunking of the first instant-canon feminist
screeds, such as those by Kate Millett or Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, whose middlebrow mediocrity crippled women's studies from
the start. It was Sontag who should have risen to the defense of
aesthetics, as feminism careened off on its Stalinist, anti-art track.

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And with her expertise in French theory, it was she who could have
exposed Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and their legion of Anglo-
American imitators for the sloppy, third-rate thinkers they are.
No patriarchal villains held Sontag back; her failures are her own.
We have all, Greeks and Trojans alike, paid the price for Sontag's
lounging in her tent.

Arriving at my first teaching job at Bennington College in 1972,
I was still fully supportive of the women's movement and confident
that it could correct its own errors and excesses. I was determined
to be an uncompromising role model for young women and to put
the radical new ideas about gender and sexual orientation into cir-
culation on campus. My major courses — "Aestheticism and Deca-
dence," "Women Writers," "Bloomsbury" — focused on deviant
sexuality but always promoted the dignity and independence of art.
With the students, I organized a women's film festival and wrote
the program notes for movies (Born Yesterday, Adam's Rib, etc.) that
illustrated modern female archetypes.

As chairman of the speakers committee of the Literature and
Languages Division, I resolved to bring women of achievement to
Bennington, despite the limited budget of an impoverished art
school. Susan Sontag was my leading candidate, but it was a struggle
to get the proposal accepted, partly because of her high fee. Not
everyone thought as highly of Sontag as I did, and inviting a speaker
merely because she was a woman was not yet socially acceptable.
On April 9, 1973, in my second semester at Bennington, I drove
two hours to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to hear Sontag
speak and, if I could, to pitch the idea of a visit to her directly.

An unseasonable snowstorm on that dark spring day made travel
slow and perilous. Parking in haste to rush to the lecture, I left my
headlights on. After her presentation, I spoke to Sontag at length
and did interest her in coming to Bennington, though sufficient
funding was iffy. Returning to my now moribund car, I realized
(after terrifying fireworks caused by a bumbling mechanic blowing
out the solenoid) that I would have to stay overnight in Hanover.
Racing back to campus, I intercepted Sontag, who asked a lecture
organizer to put me up for the night on her couch.

The car crisis gave me more time to converse with Sontag and
observe her in action. It was the period when she was directing films

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349

in Europe, and she had a very stylish, lean look — boots, trousers,
turtleneck sweaters, big belts, flowing scarves. Neither Mary
McCarthy nor Simone de Beauvoir had such a persona or would
have been able to carry it off. Though she denies it now, Sontag has
always been hyperconscious of her theatricality and used it to great
effect. I was excited by her performance at Dartmouth, since it
convinced me that I was right to press for her invitation to Ben-
nington and that she would make a spectacular impression on the
students and convert the male faculty doubters.

Negotiations began in earnest to bring The Visit off. There was
resistance in many quarters, but I won the support of the new college
president, Gail Thain Parker (who had been hired at 29, in what
may have been the last gasp of Sixties youth cult). 2 All available
money was pooled: it was twice what Bennington had ever paid any
speaker. But the total was still only half of Sontag's normal fee.
Though her publisher, acting as her agent, opposed her accepting
that amount, Sontag nonetheless agreed to come as a favor to fac-
ulty member Richard Tristman, a friend from graduate school at
Columbia.

In the melancholy postmortem, I saw that the seeds of disaster
were already sown in that preliminary agreement. Bennington, pay-
ing twice its normal amount, expected double the quality. Sontag,
accepting half her fee, planned to exert half her normal effort. As
Oscar Wilde said, ' ' When the gods wish to punish us, they answer
our prayers." The great day arrived: October 4, 1973. I blanketed
the campus with posters and flyers announcing, as per our negoti-
ations with her, that Sontag would speak about general cultural
issues and answer questions afterward. I whipped up my students
to bring all their friends for this extraordinary experience.

Sontag was scheduled to arrive from New York in late afternoon,
go directly to the president's house to freshen up and chat, then be
picked up by me for dinner with faculty at the Rain Barrel, a French
restaurant in North Bennington. After that, we would go directly
from dinner to the lecture site, the quaint old Carriage Barn. The
appointed time of Sontag's arrival came and went. Like a lonely
lookout in a Western potboiler, I tensely waited at the top of the
great drive that sweeps up from the college gate. At last a car, and
at last Sontag, nearly two hours late, fast asleep in the backseat and

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looking as rumpled and haggard as a derelict. Horror and appre-
hension swept over me as she finally arose, pufly, groggy, and dis-
oriented, to return my greeting.

Civilized relaxation at the president's house was now impossible,
so after a quick hello there, it was lickety-split to the Rain Barrel,
where time seemed to stop. Sontag refused to be hurried. With a
sonorous flourish, she ordered steak au poivre y which seemed suitably
grand and exotic. Conversing aimlessly with the other guests, she
proceeded in a maddeningly leisurely manner through the various
courses and wines. I felt we were in hellish slow motion.

The start time of the lecture floated by. Emissaries began ar-
riving from the Carriage Barn: it's full; it's been full for an hour;
the crowd is impatient; the crowd is angry; the crowd is fit to be
tied! Nothing I did or said budged Sontag in the least. Frantically
gulping wine, I realized, by the time she was ready to move, that I
was drunk but blessedly glad of it. Fortunately, it was a short drive
up the hill to the Carriage Barn which, as we entered, was tangibly
simmering with hostility.

In photos of Sontag and me standing before the crowd as I
introduced her, I am waving my arms around in what was certainly
a grotesquely unnecessary manner. Bacchus knows what I said, but
I do recall bounding around the centuries and invoking the salon —
as in "not since the female savants of the ancien regime," blah, blah.
Clearly smiling somewhat incredulously in the photo, Sontag
stepped up to the podium and said good-naturedly, "That was the
most . . . unusual introduction I have ever received!" This brought
down the house. It was the last light moment of the evening.

Collapsing onto a chair, my duty over, I prayed Sontag would
now dazzle the multitudes with the free-form cultural commentary
for which she had been billed. Instead, she removed a thin set of
folded sheets from her jacket and began to read from them. It was,
she said, a short story she had recently written. My heart sank.
Much as I admired Sontag's essays, I thought that her two novels
were awful and that she had little talent for fiction-writing. Ben-
nington was known for its creative writing program; several of the
prominent writing instructors had been among the most openly dis-
missive about a Sontag visit.

A pall settled over the crowd. The story was bleak and boring.

ON LITERATURE AND ART

35 1

It was, of course, about nothing, in the nouveau roman way. Inertia
and spleen. The packed Carriage Barn was half asleep, half hissy.
I avoided the glaring eyes and ominous signals of my students,
perched on the balcony, and tried to ignore the smug, "I-told-you-
so" expressions on faculty faces. I fantasized about having a heart
attack and being carried out feet first. Finally, mercifully, it was
over. There were some half-hearted questions and flat, desultory
responses. But it was very late and the unhappy crowd restless. The
applause was perfunctory. We decamped.

Then the reception. It would have made sense to hold the party
on campus, but Bernard Malamud, Bennington's semi-resident star
(and general pain in the ass), had insisted on giving it at his house.
So everyone had to pile into cars and parade several miles to town.
As I drove Sontag, I was surprised to learn she and Bernard had
never met. What exactly happened at the party, I don't know. But
one thing was crystal clear: Malamud — probably with his usual
intolerable air of pious paternalism — shot something nasty at Son-
tag, and she was fuming. "He invites me to his house to insult me!" —
she repeated this several times in my car on the way back to campus
afterward. She said that Malamud's wife, greeting her at the door,
had stammered, "Hi, I'm Ann Ma-Ma-Malamud." Sontag snorted,
"I should have known what kind of man he is by the fact that, after
thirty years of marriage, his wife still can't say his name!"

Sontag's fury seemed to energize her, and our conversation be-
came lively. After we pulled up to the president's house, where she
was staying the night, she sat slouched in her seat and talked for
almost an hour. What struck me immediately was that, while at
Dartmouth and for the entire evening at Bennington, she had been
"Sontag," cool, detached, austere, and lofty, she now turned in the
blink of an eye into "Susan," warm, gossipy, and distinctly Jewish
in speech and manner. The transformation was startling. Hence I
reject Sontag's present claims that it was the media or the misog-
ynous establishment that, because of its discomfort with women
thinkers, projected a false bitch-goddess persona onto her. Sontag,
who was schooled in Los Angeles, created a high-profile property
and sold it. Mazel tov! We need more women stars who can run
their own studios.

Sontag spoke freely about her life. She told me about her friend,

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the actress Nicole Stephane, the gorgeous young girl in Cocteau's
Les Enfants terribles, Stephane had recently broken an ankle and was
confined by her doctors to her chair; since she was physically active,
this was torture to her. Whereas, said Sontag with a smile, she herself
had always been physically inert and would welcome as a dream
come true doctors' instructions to sit in a chair and do nothing but
read for six weeks! We talked about other beautiful women — for
example, Adriana Asti, whom she had cast in her own film, Brother
Carl.

At one point, I gently chided Sontag about her lateness and
brought up the unplanned reading of the short story, both of which,
I said, had put me in a bad position as her sponsor and host. She
explained her being dead asleep in the car this way: she was, she
claimed to me, "lazy," and her method of doing her essays was to
"stay awake for two weeks. " Hence her fatigue on arrival in Ver-
mont. I thought to myself: "Well, now I know why her essays seem
so disorganized."

Naturally, I avoided giving my real opinion of the vapid short
story du jour. But my attempts at praise of Sontag's early essays were
strangely rebuffed. About the famous "Notes on Camp," she gruffly
declared to me: "Oh, I don't care about camp or homosexual taste
any more. Once I write about a subject, I lose interest in it." Popular
culture: equally boring, except for her own films. (I lauded the
striped furniture in Brother Carl. She was pleased; she had chosen
the fabric.) I grew more and more aggravated by her arch indiffer-
ence to everything she had glorified in Against Interpretation. Piqued,
probably, by Richard Tristman, an early supporter of mine, she
asked about my own work, the then-in-progress Sexual Personae. I
replied, but our minds did not connect. Something was missing.

My impatience, after that long, stressful day, became overt.
Finally, she asked, half irritated, half amused, "What is it you want
from me?" I stammered, "Just to talk to you." But that was wrong.
I wanted to say, "I'm your successor, dammit, and you don't have
the wit to realize it!" It was All About Eve, and Sontag was Margo
Channing stalked by the new girl. In the car, Sontag and I pleasantly
dished like yentas but made no contact on any other level. It was
many years before I realized what the primary problem was. Though
only fourteen years separate us, Sontag belongs to the generation

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353

before World War II. Born in 1947, I'm a pop culture baby. My
brain, for better or worse, is completely different from hers. Her
mind moved too slowly, because my generation's synapses are elec-
tronic and our circuitry hyperkinetic.

The next day, and for weeks afterward, I had to endure a chorus
of derision about the Sontag visit. It had been a debacle. Never again
could one argue for major funding for a megastar. A year later, I
brought Elizabeth Hardwick to campus for a minimal sum, but that
was it. The Sontag visit assumed legendary status as a low-water
reference point. It became an inside joke at Bennington about any
dreaded drudgery: "Well, at least we don't have to listen to a Susan
Sontag story!" It took me years to live down. Two decades later,
when I began to be invited to lecture around the country, I remem-
bered the lessons of that night. I have kept my speaker's fees unu-
sually low, and I try to give maximum energy and effort to my
performances.

While liking several pieces in Sontag's second essay collection,
Styles of Radical Will (1969), I became increasingly critical of her
work in the Seventies. On Photography (1977, first serialized in 1 973—
74) seemed thin and forced, exposing an unfamiliarity with art his-
tory and, oddly, a lack of instinct for visual images. Illness as Metaphor
(1978) was clumsy and ponderous, like a graduate-school seminar
paper. I hated Sontag's silence about homosexual issues in the
twenty years following Stonewall. By the time she played catch-up
in her wobbly essay on AIDS (1989), she was rightly clobbered by
the gay-activist establishment, with whom I normally disagree. On
Photography made me begin to see that Sontag's learning, aside from
philosophy and religion, is almost exclusively concentrated in the
modern period. Her pedestrian novel, The Volcano Lover (1992), and
her corny playlet about Alice James and Emily Dickinson, In Bed
with Alice (1993), demonstrate Sontag's incomprehension of any era
before her own.

Sontag belongs to the Age of Beckett, in the aftermath of the
Waste Land. There her position is secure. She is the successor to
Mary McCarthy. She is more original and versatile than Julia Kris-
teva. She was born with as much talent as Simone de Beauvoir but
did not develop it with the same tenacity; hence nothing she has
done approaches the monumental achievement of The Second Sex. As

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

much as the Foucault-obsessed New Historicists, she rejected and
squandered her own great heritage of profound Jewish learning.
Because of her European pretensions, she held herself back from
American culture and has not had the influence she should have.
She made herself an expatriate in her own land. But we are in a
period of reassessment and recovery of reputations. With all her
limitations, Sontag deserves to be read on campus far more than
the imposters and double-dealers who run women's studies. At her
best, Sontag represents independent thought and lifelong engage-
ment with artistic and intellectual issues.

Now for the campy denouement. There is no doubt my attitude
toward Sontag hardened during the long period when I could not
get published. Throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, the
material from Sexual Personae was uniformly rejected by scholarly
journals and literary magazines. Only two excerpts (on Spenser in
1979 and Wilde in 1985) were printed before the completed man-
uscript was accepted by Yale University Press, the eighth publisher
to look at it. I found particularly galling the wholesale rejections by
Partisan Review (which had "discovered" Sontag) of the copious ma-
terial on popular culture.

I began to see Sontag as queen of the cliquish New York literary
establishment. Like Gloria Steinem, she became the consummate
insider posing as an outsider. Sontag's gassiest effusions were treated
as holy writ by The New York Review of Books. By the end of the
Seventies, she had long lost her cultural centrality, but people could
only whisper it; no one dared commit such an assertion to print.
Sontag's royal insulation from reality was bad for her and cata-
strophic for American literary life.

By the time Sexual Personae finally appeared in 1990, I viewed
Sontag and her coterie as fossilized petty tyrants. Interviewing me
for the cover story, "Woman Warrior," for New York magazine
(March 4, 1991), Francesca Stanfill heard the complete saga of my
early admiration for Sontag, with the subsequent disillusionment.
In the article, a photo of Sontag and me at Bennington was mor-
dantly captioned with my bitter resume of our encounter: "I thought
she was going to be this major intellectual."

From the moment New York hit the newsstands, I became an
unwelcome hot topic in Manhattan literary circles. The Yale edition

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355

of Sexual Personae had already been out for a year and had been
dramatically featured in local bookstores. For example, Brentano's
commissioned a giant blow-up of the cover and devoted an entire
Fifth Avenue window to the book for a week. Tower Books, in
Sontag's domain of downtown New York, installed a Sexual Personae
electric-lightbox display that loomed over the entry staircase for two
years. Nevertheless, Sontag would deny that she had ever heard
of me.

Once Sexual Personae went into Vintage paperback in September
1991 and became a national bestseller, followed by the release a
year later of Sex, Art, and American Culture, another bestseller, one
might have expected some faint sign of recognition from Sontag. She
could scarcely retain her claim to intellectual preeminence while not
having heard of a controversial woman thinker of my international
standing. A perhaps apocryphal story circulated that Sontag had
once been amused, at a party, by a male writer who had been deeply
influenced by Gertrude Stein replying to a question about Stein,
"Who is that?"

Much of my residual respect for Sontag disappeared during the
blitz of American publicity for The Volcano Lover. Cover stories for
The New York Times Magazine and Los Angeles Times Magazine were
uncritical, unctuously flattering, and deficient in basic matters of
fact, notably about Sontag's political history. 3 Open warfare with
the Sontag camp broke out that month. James Wolcott's profile of
me in Vanity Fair ended with my Homeric boast, "I've been chasing
that bitch for twenty-five years, and I've finally passed her!" 4 In the
same article, Sontag's son, David Rieff, made a series of disparaging
remarks about me and my work — surprising, since his mother was
claiming she never heard of me. After this piece was published,
reporters could not get him to comment further.

Shortly afterward, in the course of speaking about another mat-
ter to "Page Six," the famed gossip column of The New York Post, I
expressed my outrage about Sontag's kid-glove treatment by The
New York Times. "Page Six" turned the affair into its lead story:

Camille Paglia has come not to praise Susan Sontag but

to bury her. The fast-talking feminist has mounted an all-
out attack on the modernist, claiming she's passe and "the

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ultimate symbol of bourgeois taste." . . . "Sontag's been
playing the intellectual bully, the intellectual duchess. I feel
I am the avenger," Camille told us by phone. "I was an
early admirer and now I'm her worst night-
mare." . . . "Sontag has been defunct as an intellectual
presence for 20 years," Paglia says. "She's been utterly
reactionary in the fields of pop culture, feminism, gay ac-
tivism, and French theory. I am the contender challenging
the heavyweight, and I believe that with my new book I
have emerged victorious." 5

The article reported that Sontag was in Barcelona and that neither
she nor her publisher would comment on my charges.

Within days, Sontag surfaced in Manhattan at the official book
party for The Volcano Lover, which seethed with deliciously catty gossip
about the Paglia-Sontag contretemps. Later that week, Sontag ap-
peared on national cable for what was probably her first-ever live-
television call-in show. The very first caller, apparently inspired by
the prankish gods, asked about me. Hesitating for a moment, Sontag
said "I don't know who she is." After her somewhat meandering
reply to the next question, the host cut to a commercial, as Sontag
appeared to make comically exasperated gestures.

The program was aired live on a Friday night. When I saw it
rebroadcast Sunday afternoon, I was exultant. With my instincts as
a counterpuncher (acquired from a lifetime of watching boxing and
other sports on television), I sprang into action. By that night, I
had talked to "Page Six." The next morning, before people even
arrived in their offices for the start of the work week, the article
appeared:

Feminist Camille Paglia thinks she has author Susan Son-
tag spooked. [Here followed a description of the television
program.] Paglia laughs that Sontag can "no longer sepa-
rate illusion from reality. . . . She either has to acknowledge
my ideas, or lie. She's a poseur. She's never had a challenger
and she can't handle it. The empress has no clothes." 6

Few things in my career have given me more pleasure than the
lightning speed with which I was able to counterattack on that

ON LITERATURE AND ART

3S7

occasion. It was the revenge of pop, which Sontag had abandoned.
The logy barons of the incestuous New York literary world were
helpless against this kind of guerrilla warfare by gossip column. As
a worshiper of old Hollywood, I felt that the combative spirit of
Hedda Hopper was with me.

It had been twenty years since America's last big literary feuds.
I loved watching Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal go at it. And there
was Mary McCarthy versus Lillian Hellman, and Truman Capote
versus Jacqueline Susann, a favorite diva of mine. Indeed, New York
had prophetically called for a return to "literary pugilistics" in an
article titled "The 1992 Literary Olympics," where Sontag and I
are imagined "mixing it up." 7 I am a believer in pagan public
spectacle, which simplifies and clarifies through dramatic symbol-
ism. In my psychology, as in William Blake's, aggression heals
repression. The sheer entertainment value of trashy literary feuds
was demonstrated by the speed with which Entertainment Weekly
picked up the story. Our photos were captioned: "Pugnacious Paglia
and Silent Sontag." When asked what would happen if our book
tours crossed, I replied, "We would slap each other silly." 8 I de-
lighted in booting Sontag into a magazine she would normally scorn.

That fall, when she appeared on Christopher Lydon and Company
on Boston public television, Sontag evidently realized it would be
wise to show some signs of connection with life. Now she admitted
that yes, she had heard of Camille Paglia, but it was only very
recently — "two and a half weeks ago"(!). And it was through some
newspaper clippings "a stranger" had kindly sent her. She indicated
no awareness that I had written any books or that she had ever seen
them, even through a telescope. When an incredulous Lydon pressed
her on this point, she became haughtily snappish. Lydon printed a
partial transcript of the exchange, with his ironic commentary, in
The Boston Phoenix? I had already told The Boston Globe, when it called,
that Sontag's stonewalling was making her seem "crazy." 10

When I appeared on his show (my third visit) the following
March, a chuckling Lydon ran a clip of Sontag's remarks and asked
me to respond to what he called her "massive denial." Laughing, I
compared Sontag to Anne Bancroft as the prima ballerina in The
Turning Point: "She is literally being passed by a younger rival, and
she's not handling it, I'm afraid, very gracefully. . . . / am the Sontag

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

of the Nineties, there's no doubt of it." Lydon spoke with amaze-
ment of Sontag's contempt for television and popular culture. I
replied:

Oh, she is so out of it! . . . Miss Mandarin did me such a
favor by coming out with this novel. Everyone remembers
the old Sontag, you see. They remember her as being beau-
tiful, as being interesting, and suddenly they really see her,
okay, for the first time. And they realize she's dull, she's
boring, she's solipsistic. She knows nothing about contem-
porary life. She is not a very good writer any longer. And
even this new novel — she's become the toast of the bourgeoi-
sie! She's no longer even avant-garde.

What is the moral of this story? First of all, enormous early
success of the Sontag kind can be destructive, not giving one time
to develop as a thinker and writer. Celebrity can create an addiction
to adulation, which is what I feel happened in Sontag's case, as in
Madonna's. Intellectuals must take strong measures to remain out-
side the establishment and to avoid cronyism. Unchallenged power
is absolutely corrupting. Sontag's abandonment of academe removed
her from the daily challenges, frustrations, scutwork, and ego-
leveling routine of teaching, which keep one honest. As I told Fran-
cesca Stanfill, when I rise, cursing, at six A.M. and drive into the
city for my 8:30 class, I often remind myself, "Susan Sontag never
did this!" Over time, a real job, in limiting and unglamourous cir-
cumstances, gives one a sense of reality, of the human norm. Leftists
who don't work become bourgeois parasites.

My rivalry with Sontag went international, notably in Brazil
and the Netherlands, which pitted us against each other in big,
splashy pictorials. Sontag now responds to queries by calling me a
"fool" or "repulsive," and saying, "Camille should go join a rock
band" — an insult for her, of course, but a vision of nirvana for Sixties
people. 11 Sontag's dated aesthetics were vividly demonstrated in the
fall of 1993 by her bizarre descent, Beckett in hand, on Yugoslavia.

When I heard that Sontag was directing Waiting for Godot in
Sarajevo, I burst out laughing. "Little Susie Sunshine," I cried,
"bringing good cheer to shellshocked Bosnia!" I was already on

ON LITERATURE AND ART

359

record as having called Godot "a repressive anxiety-formation of
defunct modernism." 12 The play is the paradigmatic work of the
pre-pop era of passive, nihilistic gloom, of loss of faith in nature,
religion, or politics. Perhaps unfairly, I viewed Sontag's Sarajevo
adventure as a ghoulish attempt to re-create her glory days, using
other people's misery as a backdrop. "Gee," I remarked to a col-
league, "I guess she can't find any plays to direct in Harlem."

Because she is divorced from mass media, Sontag may not have
realized that her pilgrimage to Sarajevo had already been done six
months earlier by several melodramatic American celebrities, in-
cluding a soap opera star, photographed by People magazine as she
wandered, looking very worried, through the rubble. 13 Bosnia had
become the cult charity of television news shows. I angrily con-
demned it as a compulsive turning away from the more immediate
and pressing subject of race relations in America, following the Los
Angeles riots of April 1992. Given the crisis state of our urban
neighborhoods, I found the national media's endless sob stories
about wounded Bosnian white girls to be gratuitous and offensive.
Where were the cameras in Philadelphia or the South Bronx?

Sontag's chic alienation from her country was eloquently ex-
pressed in her flight to Sarajevo. When a network news show dubbed
her "Person of the Week" for this exploit, her publisher said on-
screen, "Susan goes wherever there is suffering" — at which I guf-
fawed so hard, I nearly sprayed my beer across the room. Her own
city has plenty of suffering, but for various reasons it seems to
be invisible to her. On the same program, Sontag called herself
"conscience-driven."

If only Oscar Wilde were alive to do justice to the sanctimonious
moralism of the old-guard literary world. Sontag's son and sneering
coterie sit around like mournful basset hounds on deep-think talk
shows sighing about Bosnia and denouncing the American govern-
ment for not intervening, a dangerous exercise in which other peo-
ple's sons would be killed. Our literary leftists have only themselves
to blame for their failure to influence public policy.

Surely, intellectual style in the twenty-first century must be
radically different. Popular culture cannot be wished away. Global
politics will be refracted through telecommunications, the new uni-

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

versal discourse. Pondering Sontag's career, I feel with renewed
conviction that progressive values have strayed too far from direct
experience and become imprisoned in outmoded verbal categories.
An elitist leftism is a contradiction in terms. But it's Sontag's party,
and she can cry if she wants to.

1. Time, October 24, 1988.

2. For the end of the Parker presidency in a campus revolt, see
Nora Ephron's shrewd account, "The Bennington Affair," Esquire,
May 1976.

3. The New York Times, August 22, 1992. Los Angeles Times, August
16, 1992.

4. Vanity Fair, September (released mid-August) 1992.

5. "Page Six," The New York Post, August 14, 1992.

6. "Page Six," The New York Post, August 24, 1992.

7. New York, August 10, 1992.

8. Entertainment Weekly, September 18, 1992.

9. The Boston Phoenix, November 27, 1992. The interview was re-
corded September 23 and aired October 9.

10. The Boston Globe, October 24, 1992.

11. Zoe Heller, "The Life of a Head Girl," The Independent (London),
September 20, 1992. Profile of Sontag.

12. "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," Sex, Art, and American
Culture (New York, 1992), pp. 210-11.

13. People, April 5, 1993.

BOOK REVIEWS

THE STAR AS SACRED MONSTER

DAVI D SHIPMAN'S
JUDY GAR LAN D: THE SECRET LIFE OF
AN AM ERICAN LEGEND

The glamourous, tawdry lives of Hollywood stars are the hero
sagas of modern life. Born in obscurity, driven by a dream, the great
stars fight their way to fame and win their date with destiny. But
fortune's wheel is ever turning: a combination of hostile external
forces and swirling internal pressures transforms triumph and ad-
ulation into disaster and despair.

This classic paradigm, half Greek tragedy and half soap opera,
is remarkably demonstrated in David Shipman's absorbing new bi-
ography, Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend. Mr. Ship-
man, a British film historian, treats his sensational material with a
sober earnestness that at first seems flat and unadventurous but that
eventually wins our respect and trust. A fan of Garland's since he
"fell in love with her in a record shop in Oxford in 1955," he presents
her flamboyant personality with unflinching honesty, neither mor-
alizing nor minimizing her faults. Mr. Shipman's scandal-packed
book reads like the war chronicles of a laconic, unflappable battle-
front correspondent, with explosions going off and casualties every-
where.

Judy Garland was born Frances Gumm in 1922 in Grand Rap-
[New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1993]

363

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

ids, Minn. Her father, a singer and manager of a movie theater, had
left Tennessee with visions of show business. He was also, according
to Mr. Shipman, a homosexual. Garland's mother, who knew of and
later bitterly resented her husband's proclivities, had two daughters
by him and then tried to abort Frances, the third. Garland claimed
that her pushy mother took "great delight in telling rooms full of
people" about these attempts to prevent the child from being born.

As "Baby Gumm," Frances made her singing debut at 2/2 and
brought down the house with her strangely powerful voice, out of
which came her mature "belting" style. Garland said her talent was
"inherited": "Nobody ever taught me what to do onstage." The
Gumms moved to southern California in 1926 to promote the career
of their tiny song-and-dance trio, the Gumm Sisters. Frances was
already spoiled and given to "sudden, terrible fits of temper." She
rapidly turned into an androgynous tomboy, "as if," says Mr. Ship-
man, "she were becoming the son" her father had craved.

Before long a boom time began for child actors: Hollywood
studios beat the bushes for the next Shirley Temple, who was Amer-
ica's panacea for the Depression. One night, George Jessel, intro-
ducing the Gumm girls, renamed them the Garland Sisters. Frances
boldly took the name Judy from a Hoagy Carmichael song. Jessel
later said of Judy, who had been billed as "the little girl with the
leather lungs," that even at 12 she sang like "a woman with a heart
that had been hurt."

Now began the period in Garland's life most familiar to us.
Under contract at 13 to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she made several
films, including her first with Mickey Rooney and leading up to The
Wizard of Oz (1939). Garland said of these years, when she shuttled
between the set and the studio schoolroom, "My life was a combi-
nation of absolute chaos and absolute solitude." She was made to
starve what Mr. Shipman calls her "naturally pudgy" body, and
she secretly squirreled away cookies and candy bars from the studio
spies watching her every move.

Garland, Mr. Shipman reports, was soon taking appetite-
suppressing amphetamines, as well as Seconal prescribed by the
studio doctor. She needed pills to fall asleep and pills to wake up.
By 20, she was seriously addicted, in a vicious lifelong cycle that
would be dramatized in Jacqueline's Susann's wonderful Valley of

BOOK REVIEWS

365

the Dolls, which was inspired by her. Mr. Shipman says that near
the end of her life (she died in 1969) Garland was taking large
quantities of alcohol and barbiturates, as well as up to 20 Ritalin
tablets a day.

While her public image in the late 1930s was as "America's
favorite kid sister," studio insiders knew, as Mr. Shipman puts it,
that "the real Judy Garland was intense, headstrong, volatile." She
married impetuously and found herself "completely unfitted" to run
a house. She had her first two abortions and began to have affairs
with both men and women.

Always drawn to gay men, Garland finally married one, the
director Vincente Minnelli, who became her second husband and —
to the astonishment of Hollywood sophisticates — the unmistakable
father of her daughter Liza. Garland's behavior was becoming "in-
creasingly erratic." Mr. Shipman reproduces fascinating M-G-M
memos from such troubled productions as Meet Me in St. Louis, which
tartly record Garland's lateness and surliness. Paralyzed by inse-
curity, she kept the whole set waiting day after day, much as Marilyn
Monroe would do a decade later. After completing The Pirate (1947),
Garland made her first suicide attempt and was forced to enter a
sanitarium.

In 1950, after repeated incidents in which Garland's unreliable
behavior added "as much as 20 percent" to the budget of her films,
M-G-M fired her. She slashed her throat but lived. When the news
of her suicide attempt leaked and made headlines, her career entered
a bizarre new phase. Jobless and tormented, she was startled to find
herself mobbed by idolatrous fans screaming, "We love you, Judy!"
Her humiliation and suffering had made her an international diva,
locked into a passionate symbiotic relationship with a cult audience
that was heavily gay.

Garland's successive comebacks were engineered by her third
husband, Sid Luft, whom Mr. Shipman credits with shrewd business
sense and the patience of Job. There were stunning live performances
in long sold-out engagements at the London Palladium and the
Palace Theater in New York, which are still remembered by those
lucky enough to have attended as peak moments in twentieth-century
music. Garland's film career, except for A Star Is Born (1954), a box-
office failure, was essentially over.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

Mr. Shipman's book is strongest in documenting Garland's
uniqueness and mesmerizing virtuosity as a stage performer in the
1950s and '60s. There are lavish citations from ecstatic British and
American reviews, which strain for language to describe Garland's
exquisite theatrical instincts, her stamina, vitality, and trembling
tension, her operatic emotional depth and dynamic range. Like Puc-
cini's Tosca, she lived for art. She was a creature of extremes, greedy,
sensual and demanding, gluttonous for pleasure and pain. Her per-
sonal appearances were extravagant and, as one critic put it, "or-
giastic," like tumultuous pagan festivals.

Psychology is not Mr. Shipman's forte, and he does little to
explain Garland's hostility to her mother or her violently unstable
union with Sid Luft and competitiveness with her own daughters.
But his book admirably demonstrates the intricate interconnection
of commerce and art in Hollywood. We get the grit of management,
agents, contracts, bookings and ticket sales. And Mr. Shipman im-
plicitly recognizes the link between genius and criminality. The great
stars are sacred monsters, amoral vampires who drain those around
them to feed the world. Judy Garland the person was a martyr to
Judy Garland the artist, a supernormal being who destroyed as she
created.

MADONNA IN THE SHALLOWS

MADONNA'S SEX

Like a gleaming battleship with its publicity guns blazing, Ma-
donna's long-awaited, aluminum-clad book, Sex, was launched on
October 21 — and promptly ran aground in shallows of its own
making.

Jumbled and gimmicky, Sex was assembled with all the design
skills of the average high-school yearbook. Pictures are drowned in
an alphabet soup of cutesy typography. Color is chaotic. Cropping
and pasting are banal.

The shocking amateurishness of this production casts doubt on
Madonna's ambitions as an art collector. Sex should have been a
major achievement, documenting and exploring Madonna's impor-
tant artistic ideas for her core audience and a whole new one, the
serious reading public who doesn't listen to pop music and whose
view of Madonna is a tabloid caricature.

Apparently, no one among Madonna's advisers ever realized
they were producing a book. A book is not a record or video. Pro-
vocative phrases must be patiently fleshed out on the page, not
thrown into the air like confetti. Because of her flippant indifference

[US, December 1992]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

to literary history and style, Madonna's attempts to be avant-garde
self-destruct in a blizzard of cliches.

Is there anything of value in Sex? Yes, the battered but loyal
Madonna fan, like a melancholy beachcomber sifting through the
wreckage, can find glints and glimmers of the book-that-might-have-
been.

Madonna boldly attacks establishment feminist ideology head
on. She denies that "pornography degrades women." She praises
Playboy and later poses with a Playboy bunny tail. I applaud her.
The puritanism of American feminism is proved by the failure of its
pro-porn wing to publicly embrace the men's sex magazines.

Even more daringly, Madonna shows a rape scene in a high-
school gym as faintly pleasurable to the girl. She poses with legs
spread on the rapists' pinball machine from The Accused. Many
women, she asserts, stay in abusive relationships because they're
"digging it" — a psychological truth ignored in our victim-obsessed
culture. But Madonna's treatment of sadomasochism wavers: some-
times it's a decadent power trip, sometimes just a fun fashion state-
ment. The book begins: "Sex is not love. Love is not sex." This is
brilliant and momentous but isn't sustained.

The pictures are grouped in an ascending pattern, as in Dante:
We go from the hellish prison-world of urban s & m sex clubs back
to nature, the paradise of sun and surf. The southward movement
from New York to Miami has European echoes: from Dietrich-era
Berlin, with its jaded cabaret-crawlers, to the exuberant Mediter-
ranean (Madonna flirts with Italian, eats pizza, and mimics Brigitte
Bardot and Nancy Sinatra).

Unifying the book is the theme of bisexuality, or sensuality in
general, as a liberated view of life. There are dozens of sexual com-
binations. Tactile sensations — fabric, fleece, leather, hair — are em-
phasized. Liquids stream or are swum in; there is frank dabbling in
urination and sexual secretions. The book has Freud's "polymor-
phous perversity," the infant's indiscriminate total responsiveness.

Madonna's hypnotic autoeroticism is the most powerful thing
in the book. She has the charismatic narcissism of all great stars.
But this is what destroys the book as a whole. The pictures are best
of Madonna alone, mistily communing with her own divinity. The
pictures with others are awkward, sexless and contrived, "high-

BOOK REVIEWS

369

concept" bright ideas that fall with a thud. The star is a vampire
sucking out everyone else's energy, including Naomi Campbell and
Isabella Rossellini, who look sheepish and uncomfortable.

That Steven Meisel, a virtuoso of fashion ads, is an inept pho-
tographer of sex scenes was obvious a year ago in his waxy, sepul-
chral spread of Madonna as a Twenties lesbian for Rolling Stone.
Herb Ritts is the supreme photographer of Madonna's smoldering
sensuality. Sex struggles for Helmut Newton's elegant sophistication
and never comes near it.

There are a few great images here. A masked Madonna slouching
in a black-leather bikini. Bejeweled Madonna as a slinky Circe tap-
ping along a herd of male slaves with her crop. Acrobatic Madonna
as a pagan water sprite arched on a bronze porpoise. Tough-gal
Madonna crouching to light a cigarette or, booted, straddling a
radiator. Hitchhiking Madonna, hilariously nude except for high
heels and a purse.

The list of bad or mediocre pictures is long, but standouts are
a ridiculous series with tattooed lesbian skinheads, who look like
scrawny plucked chickens and radiate all the sinister sexuality of
The Brady Bunch. Among trick pictures playing with androgyny and
transvestism: Madonna's trampy kickoffs appear on the macho Va-
nilla Ice. There are lukewarm experiments in voyeurism, pederasty
and bestiality, a very dull porno comic strip, and several steamy
word-fantasies. But Madonna's eerie persona as Dita dominatrix
finally fizzles. Dietrich Dita ain't.

Sex, wrapped in Warhol silver like an interstellar candy bar,
promises a flight of imagination but delivers a very bumpy ride. The
important issues it raises — the relation of love to lust, the sluttishness
of the fully sexual woman — are never developed. That the book
contains a CD signals an inescapable truth: in music and dance,
Madonna does her deepest thinking. This is her emotional bond
with her audience, a marriage of true minds on a global scale. And
no matter how she acts, we will never divorce her.

MADONNA AS GAUGUIN

MARK B EGO'S

MADONNA: BLONDE AMBITION

Since her arrival on the scene ten years ago, Madonna has
become so synonymous with sex and publicity that it may be hard
to remember that she started as a musical phenomenon. As an am-
bitious young dancer, she dropped out of college in her native Mich-
igan and arrived in New York in 1978 virtually penniless. Homeless
and scrounging for food in garbage cans, she clung to her dream of
fame and fortune and eventually caught the attention of a series of
nightclub disk jockeys and record producers, who were struck by
her eccentric fusion of avant-garde dance moves, disco-funk music,
and hip urban waif fashion style. The rest, as Muse-mothering Mne-
mosyne might say, is history.

I write at a moment (February 1993) when Madonna's career
is in an unprecedented trough. In the fall of 1992, she released a
$50 coffee-table book of pornographic photographs, Sex (New York:
Warner Books) that became a worldwide bestseller but that lost her
crucial support among many people in publishing, media, and the
fashion industry — not because the book is shocking but because it
is boring, derivative, and sloppily thrown together. Yet Erotica, the
moody album released simultaneously with the book, was Madon-

[American Musicological Association Notes, September 1993]

BOOK REVIEWS

37 1

na's most personal and artistically adventurous, breaking the mold
of frantic, upbeat dance music that had become her signature. Here
she speaks honestly as an artist to her audience, heart to heart, below
the level of that increasingly tiresome sexual persona that has run
out of taboos to break.

Despite its dark beauty, Erotica did not have the blockbuster
sales Madonna was accustomed to, partly because of its lack of peppy
hit singles, and we soon saw pushy advertisements by her record
company on MTV, something she never needed at the height of her
career. Matters worsened when the first two videos for the album
were either dull and murky ("Erotica") or ugly and silly ("Deeper
and Deeper" — a brilliant song that deserved better). Madonna, who
had pioneered the music-video revolution in the 1980s with dozens
of stunningly conceived and photographed videos, most of which are
now classics, seemed to be losing her magic touch. Had her real-life
romantic problems sent her into a tailspin?

Madonna's longing for screen stardom began with her wonderful
performance as a street scamp (based on herself) in the film Des-
perately Seeking Susan (Orion Pictures, 1985) and led to her central
casting in two notorious bombs and a series of modestly successful
supporting roles. But came the deluge: the debacle in January 1993
of the faux-s&m Body of Evidence, which was hilariously shredded by
critics and audiences alike and may go down in Hollywood history
as one of the worst turkeys ever made by a celebrity.

But Madonna has the ability to surprise you, to remake herself
and rise phoenixlike from her own ashes. She has a bedrock support
from loyal fans worldwide, who lived through her meteoric early
career with her and will not abandon her now, even if her diversion
of energy into movies causes some uneasiness among those (including
me) who believe her real talents lie in music and dance. It is most
unfortunate that Madonna's public-relations overkill and extracur-
ricular escapades (baring her breasts at Jean-Paul Gaultier's fashion
show, for instance) have overshadowed her artistic achievements
and made it difficult, if not impossible, for cultivated and discrim-
inating people outside the pop realm to see that she is an artist, a
contention that seems to me indisputable.

Ironically, the temporary fall in Madonna's reputation has come
at the very moment of a flash flood of the first serious books about

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her. The strongest of several biographies is by Mark Bego, Madonna:
Blonde Ambition. Two essay collections have also appeared, the first
academic and absurdly pedantic, the second largely journalistic but
a lot more fun: The Madonna Connection, edited by Cathy Schwich-
tenberg (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), and Desperately Seeking Ma-
donna, edited by Adam Sexton and including a newspaper article by
me (New York: Delta, 1993).

Current academic writing on Madonna — indeed, on American
popular culture in general — is of deplorably low quality. It is marked
by inaccuracy, bathos, overinterpretation, overpoliticization, and
grotesquely inappropriate jargon borrowed from pseudotechnical
semiotics and moribund French theory. Under the misleading rubric
"cultural studies," intensely ambitious but not conspicuously tal-
ented, learned, or scrupulous humanities professors are scrambling
for position by exploiting pop culture and sensitive racial and sexual
issues for their own professional purposes.

In my opinion, writing on American popular culture should be
simple, lucid, and concrete. If Jacques Lacan is mentioned, you can
be sure you're dealing with an incompetent. The Madonna material
produced by these desperately trendy academics is shot through with
clumsy, pretentious terminology like "intertextual," "diegesis,"
"significations," "transgressive," "subversive," "self-representa-
tion," "subject position," "narrative strata," and "discursive prac-
tices." This would be comical, except for its ill effect on students
and an increasingly corrupt career system.

Bego is the author of more than twenty celebrity biographies,
many of whose subjects have been singers — among them Barry
Manilow, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Cher, Bette Midler,
and Aretha Franklin. Madonna: Blonde Ambition profits from his deep
familiarity with the modern music industry, whose commercial dy-
namic he understands without condemning or excusing it. The weak-
nesses in the book come from his unwillingness to press or explore
legitimate criticisms of Madonna in the detail they deserve, perhaps
because as a professional biographer he needs to preserve his access
to and guarantee the goodwill of his famous subjects. Nonetheless,
I highly recommend Bego's Madonna as a generally reliable and
entertaining introduction to the career of this superstar. Its chro-

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nology of events fills gaps in our knowledge of Madonna and is
invaluable to the student of recent popular culture.

Bego's account of Madonna's early years in New York vividly
documents the carnival-like downtown dance-club scene, just emerg-
ing from the crazed, cocaine-fueled, more upscale Studio 54 era.
Madonna's musical tastes from adolescence on had been Motown
and soul rather than rock, which Bego notes was more her brothers'
style. (Her recent dismissive remarks about a remarkable Guns n'
Roses double album, heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, bear
this out.) In New York Madonna was exposed to Latino influences,
coming from the clattering metallic percussiveness and complex
polyrhythms of salsa, and with the help of an early boyfriend, the
producer Jellybean Benitez, she fused them with the melting lyricism
and earthy big bassline of black music. Bego is very helpful in his
evenhanded reportage of Madonna's early collaborations with
Benitez and his rival, Reggie Lucas. This period of Madonna's
music, which produced the superb "Burnin' Up," remains my fa-
vorite, and I was delighted to see that so much about it was retriev-
able for the historical record.

Madonna was frequently accused of sleeping her way to the top
or of simply being a puppet of Svengalis in the production booth.
Bego's book lays such rumors to rest once and for all. As even her
early and still bruised manager, Camille Barbone, admits, Madonna
may have always used her sexuality to get what she wants, but her
master plan for herself, and her grit and tenacity in bringing it to
pass, is worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. But while Madonna has had
enormous popular success, the respect of the music establishment
and many rock critics still eludes her: she has never been nominated
for a Grammy and claims to be resigned that she never will. Con-
sidering the number of highly individualistic and gorgeously pro-
duced hits that she has written or co-written and that became
instantly canonical, this would appear a serious injustice.

Bego gives the first detailed descriptions of Madonna's crucial
mentoring by a gay male dance teacher in Michigan; her magpie
fashion borrowings from the stylist Maripol and the street-smart
Debi Mazar; her public flirtation with the comedian Sandra Bern-
hard; and the sketchy negotiations with Pepsi-Cola that led to the

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scandal of the "Like a Prayer" video. However, Bego is not so
satisfactory on a number of other episodes, for example, Madonna's
performance as Marilyn Monroe for the Hollywood power elite at
the Oscars, which was, he seems not to realize, a disaster. Similarly,
he skims over Madonna's needling of a visibly irritated Arsenio Hall
on his talk show, which led to another disaster, her next appearance
there with the comedian Rosie O'Donnell, when Hall let the oafish,
tittering women hang themselves before a mass audience.

Madonna's cruelty to her childhood friend, Moira McFarland,
in the documentary Truth or Dare, goes unmentioned. The psycho-
biography of Madonna's hot-and-cold relations to her siblings is a
bit thin, as is the treatment of the lawsuit against her by three of
her dancers. And there is little probing inquiry into Madonna's
involvement with AIDS activism, which, while admirable in an eth-
ical sense, has also addicted her to a tone of preachy self-righteous-
ness that has not always benefited her or her causes.

While he frankly admits her "inability to deliver simple dia-
logue" in her movies (p. 235), Bego lets Madonna off the hook about
too many artistic matters, such as her failure to research the Phil-
adelphia working-class accent required for her role in Who's That
Girl? (Warner Brothers, 1987), which she arrogantly winged on the
inept assumption that it is identical to a Bronx accent. He also
records without comment the increasing number of projects she has
been simultaneously engaged in, which has led, in my view, to the
embarrassing failures of quality control in her recent work. She is
seriously overextended.

Like Michael Jackson, Madonna may have become a prisoner
of her own celebrity. Natural instincts are stunted and mutilated by
the isolating artificiality of wealth and power. The most significant
contribution of Bego's book is its establishment of Madonna's story
as a Romantic saga of the artist-as-hero. Like the affluent Paul
Gauguin, Madonna made herself deprived, as if to obliterate her
protected middle-class origins in the squalor of a hand-to-mouth
reality. Bego proves her suffering and sacrifice. What Madonna has,
she earned. But can she survive success? Aging Romantics are in a
race with themselves.

TYRANNY OF THE TECHNOCRATS

JOHN RALSTON SAUL'S
VOLTAl RE'S BASTARDS

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian writer whose four novels of
international intrigue include The Birds of Prey and The Paradise Eater,
set in Bangkok. His practical experience has been extensive: he
managed an investment firm in Paris and served for ten years with
the Canadian government oil corporation. Saul also has a doctorate
from King's College, London; his thesis was on Charles de Gaulle.

Voltaire's Bastards, Saul's first published work of nonfiction, is an
ambitious 600-page meditation on modern culture, tracing the roots
of our troubled political, economic and intellectual systems back to
the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Despite its frequent overstate-
ments, ponderous format, and excessive bleakness, Voltaire's Bastards
is a rich, rewarding, highly original book that casts a fresh per-
spective on all aspects of our public life. There are innumerable
brilliant insights. Even when he gets his facts wrong — as sometimes
happens in his rushed survey of literary and artistic history — Saul
is suggestive and stimulating.

Saul argues that democracy is subverted by the dominance of
rational systems of control that are essentially unreformable. The
modern science of administration is king. Capitalism has been trans-

[Washington Post Book World, September 6, 1992]

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formed; it is not the owners, the stockholders, but their amoral,
faceless hirelings, the managers, who have unbalanced and bled the
marketplace at no risk to themselves. The West is obsessed with a
frenzied, sterile quest for ultimate efficiency. "Our obsession with
expertise" has produced a master caste, technocrats who are con-
summate mediocrities. Whether in corporations or government, they
are merely "number crunchers," "highly sophisticated grease jock-
eys" with "a talent for manipulation," who keep the machine hum-
ming. Our elites, like sycophantic eighteenth-century courtiers,
stand for nothing but "cynicism, ambition, rhetoric, and the worship
of power."

Saul's blistering indictment hits a great variety of targets —
though not, regrettably, American academe, where self-propagating,
overpaid technocrat-administrators are strangling education in a
way that exactly proves his points. His account of the origins and
influence of the Harvard Business School is fascinating: the founding
Harvard deans were admirers of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose
theories of "Scientific Management" for industrial reorganization
were also adopted by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and by Albert
Speer in Nazi Germany.

The business schools and schools of public policy in America
and Europe enshrine "abstract, logical process" and an "obsession
with structures." Their students become "addicts of pure power,"
without goals or vision. The economic transition from manufacturing
to a top-heavy service sector has exacerbated social problems. Nearly
three-quarters of business-school graduates go on to cushy non-
manufacturing jobs like consulting and banking. They avoid Pitts-
burgh and Birmingham, where the factories are, and settle in "the
great centres of postindustrial self-gratification," like New York and
London. Saul thinks this steering of top managerial talent away from
nuts-and-bolts experience is a major cause of our industrial decline.

In some of the most startling material of his book, Saul argues
that the modern, discreet, ruthless administrative style was created
by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, who was wounded
by a cannonball passing between his legs. Though he claims religion
is dead and comes perilously close to demonizing Catholicism, Saul
is at his best in his comparison of the arbitrary investigative method
of the Inquisition to that of today's police-state torturers. He makes

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clever connections: Descartes, pillar of the Age of Reason, was ed-
ucated by the Jesuits.

But Saul tries too hard to build a case against the last five
centuries, when in fact the trends he identifies are also discernible
in antiquity. For example, his cold, cynical company man is the
Caesar of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra or the Creon of Soph-
ocles' Antigone. And the amoral style of interrogation Saul claims
was invented by the Inquisitors is already evident in Pontius Pilate's
treatment of Jesus.

Voltaire's Bastards would be stronger with some consideration of
the evolution of commercial and political bureaucracies in Meso-
potamia and Egypt, which would demonstrate that the negative
principles Saul isolates are universal and intrinsic to civilization
and its discontents. The book also lacks sustained attention to the
Greco-Roman origins of Western logic as well as to the complex
status of reason in medieval theology. Even the presentation of post-
Enlightenment culture suffers from a curious blankness about
Romanticism, which Saul rarely mentions but which powerfully cri-
tiqued Western institutions and ideology from within.

Saul is superb, however, on military history, which is glaringly
absent from the overliterary worldview of poststructuralism. With
a novelist's instinct for historical sweep, he presents the staggering
development of the arms trade, which has distorted and impover-
ished the world economy. Secondly, he shows how this "Armada
complex" is a direct result of the victory of staff officers over field
officers in the past two centuries, a phenomenon that led to the
carnage of World War I.

Although he is unfair to Napoleon, whom he blames for inau-
gurating the pattern of godlike hero that would produce Hitler but
that again has ancient precedents, Saul's profiles of military men
from Lord Kitchener to General William Westmoreland are models
of quick-take psychological astuteness. There are dramatic juxta-
positions, such as a wonderful comparison of Cardinal Richelieu to
Robert McNamara, against whom Saul levels devastating charges
of incompetence.

The last chapters of Voltaire's Bastards feel like an awkwardly
appended coda. Saul zips through five hundred years of literature
and art, flinging out opinions from the fruitful to the bizarre. The

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current crisis in literary criticism, perfect grist for his mill, is passed
over with a few disparaging remarks about deconstruction. Popular
culture is treated in a dismissive, harrumphing way all too familiar
these days. The discussion of Christian images ignores Protestant
iconoclasm. But the book ends with a thrilling celebration of the
revolutionary power of clear, simple language against the "profes-
sional obscurantism" of the establishment. I was moved and inspired
by Saul's vision of the writer as "faithful witness."

Despite huge leaps, frustrating repetitions and organizational
uncertainty, Voltaire's Bastards is a vigorous, continuously interesting
rereading of the principal issues of our time. Its enormous cast of
characters includes Machiavelli, Marie Antoinette, Walt Disney,
James Baker, and T. Boone Pickens. Massively grounded in hard
fact, the book unintentionally exposes the flimsiness and amateurism
of New Historicism, a recent fad in literary criticism influenced by
Michel Foucault that finds imperialism under every doormat. Saul's
intricate analysis of the cold, mechanical operations of Western in-
stitutions and policy-making is informed and convincing where that
of the careless, culture-bound Foucault was not. Voltaire's Bastards
should be required reading for graduate students in the humanities.
It would break through interdisciplinary barriers without the pos-
turing and cliches of poststructuralism.

After so dire a picture of Western culture, we might expect some
concrete proposals for reform. But Saul insists, perhaps to our dis-
appointment, that the writer's mission is "questioning and clarify-
ing," not providing solutions. In this, he has certainly succeeded.
Rejecting the exhausted stereotype of left versus right, he opens up
new lines of inquiry and creates new constellations of meaning. With
his sophisticated international perspective and blunt freedom from
cant, Saul offers a promising persona for the future: the intellectual
as man of the world.

A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY

GERMAIN E GREER'S THE CHANGE

Germaine Greer is back. Unfortunately, she's in a very bad
mood.

Publication of The Change offers young American women an
opportunity to get to know one of the great lost figures of feminism.
When her wonderful first book, The Female Eunuch, was released in
1970, Greer cut a brilliant track across the cultural sky. She was
witty, learned, sexy, and stylish. In her uproarious debate with
Norman Mailer at New York's Town Hall, she tartly put men in
their place and created a sophisticated sexual persona for female
intelligence that has never been surpassed.

But Greer and feminism took a wrong turn. Within three years,
the thrilling vivacity and humor had turned into dreary ranting. As
feminist ideology hardened into political correctness in the Seventies,
the dazzlingly gifted Greer tragically cheered it on instead of pro-
testing. Her subsequent books, unevenly researched and shot
through with dogma, never won Greer the academic respect that
once seemed hers for the asking.

The Change, along with Gail Sheehy's recent best-seller about
menopause, The Silent Passage, heralds a major shift in thinking about

[People, November 30, 1992]

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gender. After more than twenty years of "social constructionism"
(which attributes all sexual differences to social conditioning),
women are ready to think about nature again. Hormones are back
in fashion.

In The Change, Greer searches the lives of prominent women of
the past for references to menopause — and finds frustratingly few.
She surveys the history of menopause as a medical category and
deftly outlines woman's fantastically complex endocrine system. To
relieve menopausal distress, Greer endorses traditional herbal rem-
edies and aromatherapy. She is skeptical about estrogen replace-
ment, which she feels simply postpones the inevitable aging process.
She argues that spiritual renewal, not plastic surgery, is menopausal
women's best hope for happiness.

In her most fascinating chapter, Greer transforms the stereotype
of the cursing, half-cracked crone or witch into a symbol of elderly
women's solitude, freedom, and vision. This will surely prove in-
spirational to lonely widows or dutiful wives callously abandoned
for younger women. But Greer backs away from her aggressive,
malicious crone. Her last chapter — glorifying the noble, plucky fe-
male spirit bravely carrying on against all odds — is cloyingly sen-
timental, the kind of airy, uplifting effusion that was a staple of
genteel ladies' magazines in prefeminist days. She strains for a glow-
ing finale to what is a very dark book.

The robins and crocuses that suddenly pop up cannot conceal
the fact that The Change seethes with vindictive bitterness toward
men, who appear only as smelly, grotesque caricatures. Science and
medicine are too often maligned here as a greedy, brutal, monolithic
"male-supremacist" establishment. There are scattered slaps at
"consumer culture" but no sustained political analysis. And let's
face it: for all her professed socialism, Greer lives like a duchess.

Greer's glum sense of isolation may owe less to menopause than
to her own misjudgments, as well as to a failure to rethink her rigid
antimale feminist ideology. When she left the University of Warwick
after the heady success of The Female Eunuch, Greer and academe
both lost. Outside the discipline of the academic world, Greer's
scholarly skills never developed. Her thinking is always stimulating
but tends to dissipate itself in flashy spurts. She recently returned

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to teaching as an unofficial fellow of Cambridge University, but too
much time was wasted.

Whatever the defects of her work, Greer is one of the women of
the century. Her sharp tongue, vibrant personality, and spiritual
odyssey will be just as vivid a hundred years from now as they are
today. Indeed, Greer may be an even more powerful figure, freed
from the burden of our expectations as her contemporaries and
disappointed fans.

SCHOLAR, AESTHETE, ACTIVIST

EDWARD SAI D'S
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM

Edward Said, one of the leading literary critics of his generation,
is a rare example of an American academic who is also an intellectual
in the European sense. As a professor at Columbia University, he
has produced ten books in more than twenty-seven years on subjects
ranging from Joseph Conrad and French theory to Orientalism and
musicology. As a Christian Palestinian educated in Egypt, he has
analyzed and protested against the West's destructive misunder-
standing of the Arab world. In short, Said is a brilliant and unique
amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist, an inspiring role
model for a younger generation of critics searching for their cultural
identity.

Said's new book, Culture and Imperialism, a collection of revised
lectures originally given in the late 1980s in Great Britain and North
America, extends his ideas into a rich variety of new as well as
familiar areas, from the nineteenth-century realist novel to Italian
opera and Irish poetry. Said's learning, like the humanistic per-
spective he espouses, is global. He is deeply immersed in comparative
literature, and his omnivorous interest in and citation of recent
groundbreaking interdisciplinary work by scholars of Africa, the

[Washington Post Book World, March 7, 1993]

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Middle East, India, and the Caribbean are impressive and useful.

Culture and Imperialism has an eloquent, urgent topicality rare in
books by literary critics, whose political thinking these days tends
to be long on ideology and short on facts and practical experience.
Said, unlike his pampered, cloistered brethren on American cam-
puses, is a true man of the world. His most telling charge against
such trendy styles as academic Marxism, New Historicism, post-
modernism, and jargon-infested deconstruction is that they are
"ahistorical." Said's efforts to mesh literary and political analysis
into a single broad discourse succeed because of his own precision
of mind and complex and unsentimental engagement with current
affairs.

The largest theme of Said's book is the crossroads America faces
after the disintegration of the Soviet Union: will we become the new
British Empire, coercive caretaker of the world? Said notes a "de-
pressing" similarity between the rhetoric of 4 'self-congratulation"
and "triumphalism" of pundits and politicians about the 1991 Gulf
War and that of British sahibs in imperial India. Has America taken
up "the white man's burden" as arrogant "civilizer" of other races
and nations with their own traditions and destinies?

Said argues that Western culture of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries was formed in tandem with the political processes of im-
perialism, resistance, and decolonization. The complete interpre-
tation of a significant number of masterworks from this period
depends on acknowledging their implication in the formation and
reinforcement of imperialistic assumptions. Said's thinking has been
influenced by Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, but he uses their
ideas sparingly and judiciously, without the coarseness of many less
cultivated literary theorists today. For Said, art and politics are
intermeshed; neither is subordinate to the other.

Said's view of "the consolidation of authority" in the novel form
is strikingly illustrated in his penetrating discussion of Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park, which he sees structured by a contrast between pas-
toral England and slave-holding Antigua — an opposition overlooked
! by mainstream readers. As always, he scrupulously cautions against
! reductiveness: he thinks of his reading as "completing or comple-
menting others, not discounting or displacing them." In such mem-
orable, finely turned phrases, which fill the book, Said shows his

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superiority to the dull run of overpoliticized critics with their tin-
eared prose.

A short review cannot fairly summarize the important issues
touched on in this book. In an ingenious analysis, Said movingly
contrasts "the opulence of India's space" in Rudyard Kipling's Kim
to "the lusterless world of the European bourgeoisie" as portrayed
by nineteenth-century French novelists. The chapter on Verdi's
"Ai'da" was of special interest to me. Perhaps Said, in building this
indictment against the imperialist commissioning of the opera by
the Khedive of Egypt, unfairly underestimates the impact that the
finale's dramatization of political tyranny has on an audience. Never-
theless, Said's rhythmic weaving of art, finance, and history feels
natural and unforced. His account of the fate of the Cairo Opera
House built for Verdi is tersely ironic: it burned down in 1971 and
became a parking lot. As Said presents it, this comic decline seems
to epitomize Europe's failure to comprehend or fundamentally alter
the cultures it invaded.

The severe chapter on Albert Camus's The Stranger is wonderful.
For Said, "the blankness and absence of background in the Arab"
murdered in the book came from Camus's repressed awareness of
the magnitude of French domination in Algeria. Against the norm,
Said sees in Camus an "incapacitated colonial sensibility." The
treatment of William Butler Yeats similarly stresses Ireland's legacy
of imperial servitude to England, though Said might be allowing
local references to overshadow the vastness of "Leda and the Swan,"
which sees Western history as a panorama marked by eruptions of
cataclysmic violence.

Said opposes "identity politics" as a splintering new tribalism
and criticizes Afrocentrism as much as Eurocentrism. He wants us
to read "contrapuntally," with sharpened attention to all competing
voices and themes in a work. My reservations about Said's approach
are, first, that only a critic with his disciplined, surgical skill can
succeed with it. In lesser hands, art gets mutilated by the rush to
polemic.

Second, the problem Said is remedying may be confined to
university literature departments, which lost contact with the
research-based old historicism during the latter days of the New

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Criticism, with its increasingly threadbare middlebrow formalism.
Time and again, I was dismayed by Said's caricature of the disci-
plines of anthropology, Egyptology, and Oriental studies, whose
massive scholarship in the nineteenth century is the foundation of
today's knowledge. As in his uncritical citations of Martin BernaPs
regrettably overideological Black Athena, he tends to accept others'
dismissal of a massive body of work of awesome learning and con-
tinuing relevance. Perhaps what we need in the movement toward
multiculturalism is not new strategies of reading but a return to a
general education based on hard fact and respect for scholarship.

Third, Said's definition of imperialism may be too limited by
overconcentration on the past two hundred years. A political theory
must take in the full span of history, from the Egyptian, Persian,
and Roman empires to those of the Moors, Inca, and Japanese. The
idea that exploration and empire-building are motivated only by
greed has to be modified by an acknowledgment that economic
development has always been tied to hierarchical organization, ex-
pansion, and exploitation of natural resources, from the first state-
sponsored irrigation projects of the Tigris and Euphrates valley in
ancient Mesopotamia.

Fourth, Said, like Foucault, neglects Romanticism in his portrait
of the past two centuries. Romantic literature is itself a critique of
the limitations in imperial, patriarchal society that Foucault and
feminism claim to have discovered. Said's equation of land with
property may be too materialistic: Romanticism sees land as nature,
the great missing term in the Foucauldian equation.

Fifth, Said's description of the international dominance of
corporate-owned mass media overrelies on negative Frankfurt-school
formulas that predate World War II. Media is more than news.
American popular culture has seduced the youth of every nation
and may indeed be the best hope yet for international and communal
life.

My other nagging questions would address why the British im-
perial system was so powerful in the first place. Military force alone
cannot explain it. Objectivity and efficiency may be Western Apol-
lonian myths, but they have been enormously fruitful as well as
oppressive.

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Said is a writer who challenges and stimulates our thinking in
every area. He is a man of profound feeling and ethical imagination.
His prose reminds me of that of Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean:
it is sober, stately, lucid, and melancholy. Literary criticism, which
is struggling to bridge the gap between art and politics, has every-
thing to learn from listening to Edward Said's dialogue with himself.

THE CORPSE OF FASHION

FRED DAVIS'S
FASHION, CU LTU R E, AND IDENTITY

This slim book has a most appetizing title. A scholarly explo-
ration of fashion, culture, and identity should penetrate to the heart
of our time. But Fred Davis, emeritus professor of sociology at the
University of California, San Diego, seems ill-prepared to deal with
any of these subjects in depth. The University of Chicago Press,
following the lamentable lead of Routledge in mistaking trendiness
for substance, ought to reexamine its editorial procedures, which
have slickly repackaged Davis's earnest, plodding prose without of-
fering him basic help in organization or conceptualization.

Neither the author nor the publisher of Fashion, Culture, and
Identity seems clear about what audience it is intended for. Davis
nervously eyes an invisible chorus of scowling fellow sociologists, to
whom he attributes a snorting dismissal of the "frivolous" fashion
industry and anyone silly enough to study it. To propitiate this
baleful battalion of hanging judges, Davis loads his pages with a
slag-heap of mind-dulling jargon and labyrinthine abstraction, so
that the reader has the sensation of tunneling through debris to find
the corpse of the subject. But then the tone changes, and we get a
simple, unpretentious passage on some interesting but familiar mat-

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

ter, like the history of blue jeans. A few flying references to Barthes,
Baudrillard, and Foucault seem added on as hasty afterthoughts to
prove the book au courant.

Davis's primary thesis is that the rapid cycle of clothing fashion,
spurred by capitalism, has been whirling since the court of Burgundy
in the late Middle Ages and is somehow unique to Western culture.
To prove this, Davis would have to show how changes of fashion in
ancient Egypt and Babylonia, Mogul India, or imperial China and
Japan were dissimilar. But his research into non-European cultures
is nil. Davis's passing assertions that changing styles in clothing are
inherently different from changing styles in literature, rock music,
cars, or coiffures are unconvincing since, again, he has made no
systematic inquiry into those areas.

A troublingly high percentage of Davis's material consists of
long quotations from other authors, which unfortunately constitute
the best-written passages in the book. In one of the cliches of current
academic practice, Fashion, Culture, and Identity tries to disguise its
failures of research and reasoning by jazzy chapter titles ("Boys will
be Boys, Girls will be Boys") and piquant epigraphs. Then we are
left on our own to thrash around in the jumbled, repetitious text,
with its vague chronology and tortured English.

Davis's introductory chapter hails semiotics as our future sal-
vation, in particular "its seminal notion of code as the binding lig-
ament in the shared understandings that comprise a sphere of
discourse." Leaving aside the flurry of mixed metaphors here, one
notes the provincialism of this widespread belief: self-strangling se-
miotics did not invent the idea of "code," which was already central
to anthropology, comparative religion, and art history, notably in
Erwin Panofsky's theory of iconography, which has heavily influ-
enced scholarship and classroom teaching for over fifty years.

Western culture, claims Davis, suffers from ambiguity and am-
bivalence of identity, which our ever-changing fashions serve to ex-
plore and express. This is a promising idea, but Davis's learning is
not wide enough to do it justice. He has little familiarity with modern
psychology or ancient Western history. Vague generalizations about
Western identity that begin with medieval France and can't take in
Sophocles, Catullus, or Nero are useless. Davis also makes wild

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overstatements about the prevalence of androgyny or cross-dressing
in Western fashion, which has been only a sporadic phenomenon
geared to specific transformations in sex roles. He is right to insist
that fashion signifies far more than status, but he never fully nails
down what that "more" is.

In a chapter with the promising title "The Dialectic of the Erotic
and the Chaste," Davis again shows his limitations. Jean Fouquet's
fifteenth-century painting of a stylish enthroned Virgin with a bared
breast is simplistically underinterpreted for its "erotic-chaste ten-
sion." Here, as throughout the book, Judeo-Christianity is treated
as a huge, monolithic, body-denying, sex-hating institution. The
differences between Mediterranean Catholicism and Northern Eu-
ropean Protestantism, or among different denominations of Prot-
estantism, are not seen. Nor does Davis have the slightest inkling
about similar conflations of exhibition and concealment in the pagan
tradition: the virginal Archaic kore sculptures, the bare-breasted
"Dying Amazon," the stately, bosomy, lounging goddesses of the
Parthenon pediment, with their plastered, wet-look draperies, and
the Hellenistic bathing Aphrodites, leading up to the Roman "Venus
Pudica," or modest Venus, revived by Botticelli.

In "Stages of the Fashion Process," Davis tries to analyze the
dynamics of the fashion industry from the designer's initiating idea
through its material embodiment and display to the manufacturing
of scaled-down versions of the garment for distribution to middle-
class stores. But he bounces all over the map, with no feeling for
period or place. We get newspaper cuttings and bland quotes from
anonymous interviewees thrown in at random, and end up with a
mushy pudding that will enlighten no one. For heaven's sake, the
mechanics of the rag trade are common knowledge to us through
dozens of movies and television mini-series. Susan Hayward has it
all down in / Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951).

The fashion advertisements sprinkled through the book are strik-
ing and well-chosen, but Davis's commentary on them is usually
inadequate or just plain wrong. For example, he misses all the com-
plexities in the appealing jacket photo of a straw-haired gamine in
a baseball cap: Huckleberry Finn, Li'l Abner, Jean Seberg, and 1950s
beatniks (fisherman sweater and leotards). He grandly dubs the chic

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

beard stubble of a young dude in a Perry Ellis suit a "disingenuous
mistake," when it's an allusion to Jean-Paul Belmondo and 1930s
gangster films.

I found this book tedious, uninformed, and unperceptive, first
because, as a student twenty-five years ago, I grounded my own
thinking about clothing in the excellent, rich, and still reliable fashion
histories produced from the late nineteenth century to the second
world war by such shrewd analysts as J. C. Flugel and James Laver.
Second, I have been heavily influenced by gay men, with their keen
sensitivity to and encyclopedic knowledge of the art of fashion and
gesture, a connoisseurship of aesthetes descending through Oscar
Wilde from Gautier and Baudelaire.

The witty gay style, dramatic and incisive, is our best hope for
a sophisticated fashion discourse free from the moralistic anti-beauty
ideology of establishment feminism and the incompetence and
theory-mad cant of the "cultural studies" movement, from which
Davis's work has emerged. Afternoon tea with your average drag
queen is likely to be more rewarding and informative about fashion
than is this choppy, meandering, confused book.

CRY OF THE INVISIBLE MEN

WARREN FARRELL'S

THE MYTH OF MALE POWER

Warren Farrell, author of The Liberated Man and Why Men Are
the Way They Are, served for three years on the board of directors of
the National Organization for Women in New York City. In his
latest book, The Myth of Male Power, he describes how his career as
one of "America's Sensitive New Age Men" skyrocketed when he
endorsed the standard feminist view of women as "enlightened" and
of men as "Neanderthals." He received standing ovations, lecture
invitations, financial rewards.

But, Farrell states, as his position evolved toward one more
sympathetic to men, the applause died and the money began to dry
up. Reviewing tapes from his workshops and personal appearances,
Farrell was troubled by his earlier double standard: "When women
criticized men, I called it 'insight,' 'assertiveness,' 'women's liber-
ation,' 'independence,' or 'high self-esteem.' When men criticized
women, I called it 'sexism,' 'male chauvinism,' 'defensiveness,' 'ra-
tionalizing,' and 'backlash.' . . . Soon the men were no longer ex-
pressing their feelings. Then I criticized the men for not expressing
their feelings!"

The Myth of Male Power is a quirky book, part confession, part

[Washington Post Book World, July 25, 1993]

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

polemic. Its organization, consisting of short passages with blazing
headlines and overabundant boldface type, is somewhat awkward,
choppy, and repetitious. Systematic argumentation is scanted, and
there is sometimes a questionable selectiveness or credulity about
historical sources, both present and past.

But FarrelPs vices as a writer are also his virtues. His gruff,
blunt manner breaks through the decorous white middle-class con-
ventions and victim-obsessed sentimentality that have paralyzed es-
tablishment feminism in recent years. The Myth of Male Power is a
bombshell. It attacks the unexamined assumptions of feminist dis-
course with shocking candor and forces us to see our everyday world
from a fresh perspective.

Farrell feels that feminism's primary objective as a political
movement — equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the
Fourteenth Amendment — has been lost in the "anti-male sexism"
of affirmative action programs and other preferential regulations and
grievance procedures that guarantee special protections to women
and thus ironically perpetuate the pernicious old stereotype of
"woman as child." The media, far from opposing and obstructing
feminism (as Susan Faludi claims in Backlash), has cynically pan-
dered to feminist pressure groups and indulged in "a quarter century
of male bashing." As a student of media, I think Farrell is dead
right about this.

In brutal, grisly language, Farrell dramatizes the carnage of
"male-killing" throughout history — the one million men, for ex-
ample, slain or maimed at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
Men are not, he insists, the powerful sex but "the silent sex" and
"the suicide sex." They are "disposable," dispensable, slaves to
higher powers. Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves phys-
ically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and chil-
dren. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist
rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressors and callous exploiters.

Farrell's blistering indictment makes powerful use of contem-
porary anecdotes. During the 1991 trial of boxer Mike Tyson for
rape, the hotel where the jury was sequestered caught fire; two
firefighters died. The media, obsessed with the tunnel-vision feminist
view of "men-as-rapists," ignored this contrary evidence of "men-
as-saviors." According to Farrell, there are a million municipal vol-

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393

unteer firefighters in America who valiantly "risk their lives to save
strangers." A startling fact that should disturb and embarrass every
feminist: 99 percent of these firefighters are male.

Again and again, Farrell demonstrates that, for all the official
talk about desiring equality, the overwhelming majority of contem-
porary women continue to avoid hazardous, dirty, low-prestige jobs
that men take in order to earn a higher income for their families.
Miners, loggers, roofers, garbage collectors: Farrell celebrates the
invisible men whose backbreaking and sometimes fatal work makes
modern life smooth and efficient for pampered, feminism-spouting
professionals in their safe, well-lit offices.

The Myth of Male Power is a muckraking expose for the nineties.
It uncovers an unsettling pattern of collusion between government-
funded commissions on women and a coterie of feminist leaders and
career consultants who claim to speak for all women. It demonstrates
how biased surveys and shaky statistics have been used to swell the
numbers of reported rapes or prove discrimination against women
in employment, medical research, and the justice system. It quotes
astonishing pieces of gloomy, anti-male agitprop from such putative
reference works as Encyclopedia of Feminism and The Women's History
of the World.

In the largest sense, Farrell sees contemporary gender problems
as flowing from our historical transition from an epoch ("Stage I")
where survival was the basic issue to one ("Stage II") where com-
munication and cooperation, rather than competition, are required.
Here Farrell's theories dovetail with the best in feminist theory: he
sees the killer male as a dominant Stage I type unable to adapt to
Stage II economic and ethical realities. Now we have a pressing
need "not for a women's movement or a men's movement but for
a gender transition movement" that would revolutionize both be-
havior and perception.

The Myth of Male Power is the kind of original, abrasive, heretical
text that is desperately needed to restore fairness and balance to the
present ideology-sodden curriculum of women's studies courses. De-
spite its technical flaws and raw inelegance, the book is filled with
stunning insights and haunting aphorisms, such as "female beauty
is the world's most potent drug."

Warren Farrell is one of many voices urging a critique and

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

reform of current feminism in order to strengthen it for the twenty-
first century. As Farrell says, "discrimination begets discrimination
begets discrimination." Equality means not just "equal options" but
"equal obligations," a rejection of the passive role of perpetual vic-
tim. Government must not become modern woman's "substitute
husband." Farrell calls for an end to the blame game and a new
stress on personal responsibility, social maturity, and self-
enlightenment.

SATIRES AND
SHORT TAKES

ASK CAMILLE PA6L! A!
ADVICE FOR THE LOVELORN,
AMONG OTHERS

When Spy asked me to write an advice column, I was delighted. I've
loved this snappy American genre since I grew up reading tart-
tongued Ann Landers in the Fifties — I even made up both the ques-
tions and the answers for satiric advice columns in my high school
newspaper. The following letters are authentic, though sometimes
condensed.

FEBRUARY

Dear Camille:

I've been with a woman for ten years. Should I propose mar-
riage? My concerns are (1) her loathsome, self-pitying complaints
and (2) my suspicion that I could not remain faithful.

Despondent in Oregon

Dear Despondent:

The crystal ball shows a tacky picture of a nag and a philanderer
hurling crockery around the kitchen. Misery has enough company
already. In fact, they're parking on my lawn.

[Spy, 1993. Though locations are real, Paglia supplied all but three of the

closing epithets.]

397

398 VAMPS & TRAMPS

Dear Camille:

What can I do with this PoMo relationship of mine? My boy-
friend is a stand-up comic constantly touring the country. I'll be in
grad school for the next four years. Can long-distance relationships
work?

Down-at-the-Mouth Dan in Northern California

Dear Dan:

I foresee many a moon of quick-fix, laugh-a-minute phone sex.
Every relationship is a triumph of imagination. Yours will be tested
to the credit limit.

Dear Camille:

I'm an overeducated, underemployed, bored and bisexual, fit
and femme woman of the twentynothing generation. I fall for
scrumptious young men "raised right" by their mothers. They're
intrigued, then intimidated by my ferocity in bed. I'm in love with
a sensitive, affectionate boy who is scared to death of me. Should I
forget my affinity for boys and find myself a feisty female?

Too Sexy for the Boy in Baton Rouge

Dear Too Sexy:

This is a classic case of the Diana and Endymion myth: a ma-
ternal Amazon goddess smacking her lips over androgynous boy-
flesh. I'd say keep him as a side dish and supplement the menu with
more robust confections. As for feisty females, I hope you have better
luck than I do!

Dear Camille:

I've been severely disappointed in my lady friends, who come
across as intelligent women with common sense but end up making
bad choices when it comes to men.

Jolted Joe from Brooklyn

Dear Joe:

You are puzzled by the irrational perversity of sexual attraction.
Dionysus is a maelstrom. Love will never be tidy or safe. Jump in
the boat and row for your life.

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

399

Dear Camille:

My fiancee and I revere you as a goddess. I once had an un-
healthy, mutually manipulative relationship. Two weeks after we
stopped speaking, she came into my dorm room to talk. We started
to fool around. She seemed to be enjoying it, though when I asked
if she wanted to have sex, she said, "I don't care." I went ahead
and had sex with her. She later publicly denounced me as a rapist.
But she never resisted or even told me to stop. Was it rape?

Confused in Kansas City

Dear Confused:

No, it's not rape. It's a scene from an Antonioni movie, all
Weltschmerz and ennui. Feminist dogma keeps people from recog-
nizing good old-fashioned decadence. Go for it!

MARCH

Dear Camille:

I'm a sixty-year-old man who has been married five times. I'm
currently courting a fifty-three-year-old Catholic medical missionary
nun. How do I ask her to give up her vows and marry me?

Amorous in Sarasota

Dear Amorous:

Hot dang! Violate them taboos, baby! You're Perseus rescuing
Andromeda from the toils of that old devil Church. You may need
a can opener, but it's worth a tumble.

Dear Camille:

I'm a biochemist who must keep up by attending lectures that
contain fast-breaking data. The leader in our field shows nude slides
of his girlfriends during his lectures and provides copies to men who
request them. Women have walked out of his lectures, protested to
the hosts, thrown things at the screen, to no avail. What does this
man gain from our discomfort? What should we do?

Stumped in Toledo

Dear Stumped:

Unfortunately, I enjoy nude pictures in any context. A bio-

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

chemical porn show has Broadway possibilities. But the guy sounds
like an unprofessional klutz with a microchip wee-wee. Try scorn
and satire. They work for me.

Dear Camille:

If you were really born in 1947, why do you look as though you
were born in 1937 or even 1927? I want to avoid whatever you did
to get those deep, saggy lines!

Bilious in Maryland

Dear Bilious:

Listen, pinhead, I'm a short, fast-talking comedienne with dim-
ples who imitates Keith Richards to avoid looking like Sally Field.
Get lost! Haggard is hip.

Dear Camille:

Women I hardly know come up to me all the time and give me
that deep, knowing, womanly look. I feel these women have a terrible
power over me. Should I just screw them? Does it matter that they're
my students?

Baffled on Long Island

Dear Baffled:

The gals (white and middle-class, right?) are battin' their
eyes at Big Daddy. You've discovered the truth: Sexual harass-
ment is a hot-tar, two-way street. Wait till they graduate, then dive
right in.

Dear Camille:

I used to think Rousseau was the stupidest asshole in the history
of philosophy. Now that I'm getting on in years, I wonder if I would
have found assholes of greater magnitude if I'd pursued that subject
further. Who is el sphinctero grande of all time?

Curious in San Francisco

Dear Curious:

Michel Foucault, naturellement!

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

40 1

Dear Camille:

I know that consumerism is the modern pagan religion and that
the media is the altar upon which we offer up flesh sacrifices. I do
enjoy watching the succession of heroes and heroines devoured by
television. But I have lingering feelings of guilt, as if I am worshiping
Satan. Yes, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night shouting,
"Consumerism is the Beast 666!" How can I loosen up, become
more modern, and enjoy life?

Anguished in Oregon

Dear Anguished:

I prescribe a daily dose of my favorite soap, The Young and the
Restless. What metaphysical anxiety could survive the soothing pres-
ence of plucky Nikki, trampy Jill, and teen queen Christine? Tele-
vision is our Circe, and she's a date rapist. Just lay back, relax, and
spread your sense organs.

Dear Camille:

The first time we met, the electricity was unbelievable. I'm
married and white; he's black and ten years younger. He's also my
boss. After two years of flirting, we became lovers. We have nothing
in common but work and sex. Our Baptist-Cracker conservative
company doesn't condone intraoffice or interracial dating. I can't
stop thinking about him. I'm a headstrong, independent, take-charge
woman. So why can't I handle this relationship? Why am I so
irrational?

Reeling in Fort Lauderdale

Dear Reeling:

Sex is the biggest electric company of them all. It shocks, short-
circuits, overloads, and generally fries the brains. When the wires go
underground, they raise their own voltage. It's like snake-handling:
Keep at it till the chills outnumber the thrills.

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

APRIL

To the many readers who asked me for a date:

I am reviewing applications from all genders. But why hasn't
Drew Barrymore written to me yet?

Dear Camille:

I'm in my late twenties and haunt L.A. coffeehouses searching
for an intellectually stimulating female partner among the patrons.
But I find myself more attracted to the waitresses. In the Male-
Confused-Nineties, I fear that making advances on these working
women is sexual harassment. Is it wrong to flirt with them?

Anxious Alex

Dear Anxious:

I too get starry-eyed over waitresses. I suspect there is a Cosmic
Mammary archetype behind all this. Waitresses have more on the
ball, anyhow, than the chi-chi literati you're pursuing. Proceed cau-
tiously, but give it a shot.

Dear Camille:

I'm an attractive twenty-three-year-old gay male. In bars, I
notice that attractive men usually have ugly boyfriends. Why is this?
How am I supposed to get a boyfriend when all the good ones are
dating Ernest Borgnine look-alikes? When I do meet someone who
doesn't need a bag over his head, he turns out to be a flaky, slutty
jerk.

Single in Seattle

Dear Single:

A lesson of eros — only one megastar per household, please.
Every god needs a priest in polyester.

Dear Camille:

Two buddies of mine who live thousands of miles from each
other were unceremoniously dumped a couple of years ago by their
girlfriends. Right after chucking their excess baggage, both girls

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

403

adopted all the significant traits of their former boyfriends. One
went from being a pampered trust-fund baby who read Woolf and
subscribed to trendy political causes to being an ardent backpacker
in love with Conrad. The other changed her major from environ-
mental science to classical anthropology and philosophy and her
music from Depeche Mode to the Lime Spiders. You get the picture.
Why would these women become the men they no longer love?

Musing in Kankakee

Dear Musing:

I am stunned by this colorful evidence of the ancient principle
of female vampirism, recorded everywhere in world mythology. Hav-
ing sucked men dry, like marrow from a bone, woman calmly sails
on to her next adventure. Sublime!

Dear Camille:

I supplement my unemployment checks by selling phone-sex
scripts. I'd rather sell short stories, but nobody's buying. I seem to
have a knack for cranking the stuff out. But I don't know whether
to think of myself as a cheap media whore or a valuable public
servant. Nothing gobs up the creative flow more than the image
of a fat, lonely, middle-aged insurance salesman lying on his bed
and pulling on his weenie while he listens to my words coming over
the line. He and millions of other schmucks may need the help of
a prosthetic imagination. Perhaps I am helping to release poten-
tially dangerous sexual energy in a quick, tidy gush at the end of
the day.

Pondering in Portland

Dear Pondering:

Though it might seem like a drainage ditch, you too labor in
the vineyards of art. Apollo and Aphrodite bless all makers of erotic
images.

Dear Camille:

My lesbian girlfriend and I have a running argument about
the last scene in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. I guess I'm WASPy

404

VAMPS & TRAMPS

and prosaic, but I think it's about having sex with a dog. My
lover is French, however, and claims she cannot understand it this
way, having read Lacan and Derrida. The argument becomes so
heated that I wonder if I can live with a poststructuralist. What can
I do?

Stymied in North Carolina

Dear Stymied:

How did your poststructuralist escape deportation? I heard
they were reclassified as illegal aliens. Take her to McDonald's
and deprogram her. If that doesn't work, box her and return to
sender.

MAY

Dear Camille:

I have no trouble getting women in bed, but I just can't hold
back. The evening ends before I can undo my belt.

Mortified in Madison

Dear Mortified:

You overeager acolytes of the Goddess have an ancient lineage.
At Cnidos, Praxiteles' famous marble statue of Aphrodite was
stained by a worshiper's ejaculation. Curtail your excitement by
imagining something depressing — like being trapped in an elevator
with the leaders of NOW.

Dear Camille:

I'm a thirty-five-year-old married woman. Lately I've been eye-
ing the kinds of guys I liked when I was fifteen: lean, long-haired,
vacant, flannel-shirt-wearing hunks. May I have one?

Lustful in Los Angeles

Dear Lustful:

You mirror my mood exactly. Gather ye flannel while ye may.
When lust unbridles, can menopause be far behind?

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

405

Dear Camille:

Recently I went camping in the Catskills with three buddies.
One night I put out the campfire by urinating on it. I thought my
friends would applaud my decisive, manly gesture, but they pro-
tested loudly. The whole experience left me feeling hollow.

Dejected in New York

Dear Dejected:

Freud felt urinary fire-extinguishing was early man's first proof
of prowess. Today, writing girls' names in the snow is the more
favored piss poetry. Expand your repertoire!

Dear Camille:

I'm a female who has rape fantasies featuring ex-convicts, aliens,
postapocalyptic mutant gang leaders, etc. While I invent dialogue
for both sexes, I feel more "inside" the male character, even after
the female has gained the upper hand, which always happens. Am
I bisexual, sadomasochistic or just strange?

Is This Hell? No, This Is Iowa

Dear Hell-in-Iowa:

Make movies as soon as possible. Surf's up in your sharkish
libido. It's the cyberpunk 1990s, so take us for a ride on the wild
side.

Dear Camille:

I'm a big WASP boy who has an ongoing thing with an older,
burly Sicilian man. He's on the jealous side and says he would "cut
out my heart" if he caught me with another man. But he admits
having fantasies about watching me in the act with someone else.
Another Sicilian man has come into the picture. Have I bit off more
than I can chew?

Italophile in California

Dear Italophile:

Two Sicilians, one knife, and a hunk of white bread. Hmmm.

406

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Better keep your panettone covered and your eye on the nearest fire
escape.

Dear Camille:

What's your advice about the ever-popular male pastime of
verbally harassing women on the street? My gut instinct is to snap
back with "Fuck off," but it's interpreted as an invitation to further
dialogue.

Irate in Chicago

Dear Irate:

Nothing made me angrier during my militant-lesbian-feminist
phase twenty years ago. I now feel the street is a combat zone and
modern women should not expect middle-class overprotection.
Men's guttural lunges are primal mating rituals, a crude homage.
Take the mentally superior position of mother or teacher and respond
with quiet withering boredom or comic repartee. I've seen African-
American women dish it right back with humor, not rage, and win
the exchange.

Dear Camille:

I'm a twenty-five-year-old full-blooded Italian rock musician. I
had a deep, loving, sexually hot relationship for three years with a
woman nine years older. Since we broke up, I've dated and slept
with a lot of girls. But (1) they're total intellectual duds; (2) their
idea of sex is lying in bed like a cadaver; or (3) they complain about
their lives but don't have the balls to do anything about it. I'm so
frustrated that sometimes I wish I were gay!

Glum in L.A.

Dear Glum:

I sympathize. A good gal is hard to find, and don't I know it.
It seems your taste buds are primed for more mature wine. (See
American Gigolo and "Lustful," above.)

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

AUGUST

407

Dear Camille:

I was making love with a beautiful feminist grad student. As
we climaxed I mentioned your name, causing every muscle in her
body to tense up immediately. It was the best orgasm in my life. I
realize I was exploiting your name, but do you mind?

Wondering in West Hollywood

Dear Wondering:

Your partner's Harpy-like clutching is called vaginismus. Pop-
ular myth tells of men trapped and requiring surgical extrication.
Use and abuse my name as you please. I love causing friction!

Dear Camille:

I'm a bisexual female who passionately loves hard rock and
heavy-metal music. The guys I like only want the typical "heavy-
metal bimbos." And gay women spout the usual "feminazi" dogma
about hard rock being degrading, exploitative, and misogynist.

Lonely in Iowa

Dear Lonely:

Rock 'n' raunch is sexual reality. The new feminism will cut its
teeth on heavy-metal power chords. Crank up your own wattage,
and don't take no for an answer.

Dear Camille:

As a teenager in the States, I felt extremely abnormal because
my foreskin was intact. I felt freakish and unpatriotic and suffered.
What's your opinion of America's assembly-line snippage of infantile
prepuce?

Feeling Normal in Frankfurt

Dear Normal:

Cut or uncut? Torpedo or lampshade? That is the question. In
this deodorant-obsessed land of the bald eagle, gleaming Mr. Clean
is our naughty little flesh-puppet.

408

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Dear Camille:

I was involved with a comp lit major for seven years and was
haunted by a sense of failure for not understanding the "conference
cant" of the Derrida posse. Luckily I escaped the California infes-
tation of these maniacs, but not before this woman had demasculated
me to the point of premature ejaculation.

Recuperating in Rancho Mirage

Dear Recuperating:

Polluters of the brain commit crimes against humanity. Dante's
Inferno has a special reserved foxhole for the followers of Lacan,
Derrida, and Foucault, who will boil for eternity in their own verbal
sludge.

Dear Camille:

When I'm using the office urinal, one of the dorkiest managers
comes in, stands next to me and talks about the stupidest things. Is
there a polite way to ignore him, or should I wet his leg? Does this
problem happen to women?

Pissed Off in Hackensack

Dear Pissed Off:

Women adore gabbing in the john. It's a freaking hen party!
As for your manager, can it be love?

Dear Camille:

After her orgasm from oral sex, my girlfriend starts laughing
hysterically. What does this mean? Is my hard work being taken
seriously?

Concerned in Calgary

Dear Concerned:

Bursts of irrational emotion, like weeping, are reported of or-
gasmic women. Beware of manic Maenads! The female worshipers
of Dionysus tore goats and heifers limb from limb with their bare
hands.

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

409

Dear Camille:

I'ma twenty- three-year-old gay male who planned to get a sex-
change operation to make myself more appealing to a straight co-
worker. My current boyfriend is threatening to leave me because of
this. Then there's a woman who wants me desperately.

Wavering in Lompoc

Dear Wavering:

I envy your ability to draw a crowd. Your life is a Fellini film
lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head. I would advise
putting the operation on hold. Some merchandise is nonreturnable.

Dear Camille:

My girlfriend has started ejaculating and I've stopped. Through
Tantra, we trade spontaneous combustion for hours-at-a-time ritual,
with astounding results. Can all women ejaculate? We're talking
cupfuls — you haven't seen an "arc of transcendence" until a five-
foot fountain of amrita erupts from your beloved's yoni.

Electro-Shakti'ed in Kansas City

Dear Shakti'ed:

In Coleridge's Xanadu, a geyser blasts up from a chasm, as if
the earth is in orgasm. Pagan nature cults release titanic energy.
Female ejaculation is the latest thing, demonstrated by Annie Sprin-
kle in her sacred-orgy video, Sluts and Goddesses. Bring an umbrella.

FEMINIST FATALE

From an edition of Man Alive, with host Peter Downie. Produced by Sam
Levene and David Cherniak for the Canadian Broadcast Company. Filmed on
September 4, 1991, in Philadelphia. Aired in Canada December 14, 1992, and
on public television in the United States in early 1993.

PETER DOWNIE (in CBC studio in Toronto): Tonight on Man Alive —

(Cut to pages (^Sexual Personae, then paglia in violet suit.)

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

CAMILLE PAGLIA (with Downie in Philadelphia): In paganism you have
a unity between sexuality and spirituality, winch is a great
ideal. ... I love the sleaziest parts of TV. . . . Madonna and I
have a pornographic imagination. It's coming from the repres-
sions of the Catholic Church. ... I feel very lucky that somehow
I wasn't drawn to drugs. I'm not sure why. I think I'm addicted
to my own hormones — my adrenalines or whatever they are.
I'm the speed-freak Sixties, you know? I never had to take any-
thing, because that's just me, all right? I feel like I'm coming
out of the Bob Dylan electric period, that kind of, like, speed-
freak jive, kind of that rap —

(Back to DOWNIE in Toronto. He freezes PAGLIA'j onscreen image.)

DOWNIE (laughing): Hi, I'm Peter Downie, and her name is Camille
Paglia. And this (gestures with the remote control) is about the only
way I have to stop her. She's been called "Hurricane Camille"
and the "Joan Rivers of Academe." But make no mistake about
it: it's her ideas, not her delivery, which have made her the
hottest critic around, whether she's writing in The New York Times
or in Penthouse magazine. She has provocative ideas on just about
everything — from feminism to rock and roil and from Madonna
to political correctness, and those ideas come at you like fire
from a machine gun. Her book, Sexual Personae, took twenty years
to publish, and it's really become a launching pad for her, from
where she now sits and takes careful critical aim at life. Trying
to neatly package the energy of her mind for a television program
is a bit like trying to grasp a bolt of lightning. As soon as you
think you've got it, it's off in another direction. You might be
angered by what you're going to hear, and you might be pleased.
But I don't think you'll be bored — by Camille Paglia.

(With DOWNIE in Philadelphia)

PAGLIA: I know that my personality was not made. My personality
was born. I'm an Aries woman like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis,
and so we have a lot of problems with people because of this.
We're just so obnoxiousl I'm forty-four years old, and people are
still having to speak to me like, you know, "That was very rude.
You shouldn't behave like that, you shouldn't." Even today,

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

41 1

people are always lecturing me about my excessive behavior and
the way I completely ignore social forms and decorum and so
on and so forth. So it's been a struggle for me. This is why I see
society as civilizing. I don't see society as oppressive, because
in my case, my barbaric energy needs to be contained. It needs
to be contained. Otherwise, I'd be killing people and, you know,
stealing and God knows what else! I'm just like this egomaniac.
I'm an Aries — pure egomania, all right?

DOWNIE: Let's begin by looking at the Sixties. What happened to
the realism of the Sixties? What happened to the idealism of the
Sixties?

PAGLIA: I think the whole thing just got out of control. I think a
part of it was the contempt for the older generation. In the sense
that, "We have nothing to do with you, and we have something
new, something new to ofTer, and we don't have to listen to you
at all." And part of that came from the fact that our parents —
one didn't realize it at the time, but as the years went on, I saw
it very clearly — our parents were resting, after decade after dec-
ade of the Depression, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, World
War II, the bomb, the discovery of the concentration camps,
the Cold War and so on. And our parents wanted a better life
for their children than they had had. They had had nothing since
they were young but worry, but anxiety, but darkness, all right?
So they were determined to create an environment that would
protect their children from what they had suffered. As a con-
sequence, they did not tell us about the realities of the world.

And I think that's what I felt like growing up in the Fifties.
I thought, what? This is so boring! This is so sanitized. I can't
stand this! I felt like I was in prison in the sex roles of the Fifties,
in the politics of the Fifties. I mean I'm still claustrophobic from
it. We have this TV series down here, you know, Happy Days,
which has given a very biased picture of what the Fifties were
like. This idea that somehow, you know, a black-jacketed guy
like Fonzie could be received at the house of the red-haired boy,
okay — that's absurd! The hoods could never be received! There
was absolutely a repressive era where the hoods represented the
criminality and sexuality and everything that was outlaw, all

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right? And so I feel The Twilight Zone very accurately represents
the Fifties' instability, that is, a sense of normality which is then
disturbed by eruptions of what has been repressed, okay, what
has been repressed in the cellar, what has been put up in the
attic. And I feel that my work — in Sexual Personae, I feel that
what I'm doing is going down into the cellar and up into the
attic and bringing into the eyes of everyone what our parents
did not want to think about. Everything. Whether it's pornog-
raphy or aggression or Nazism, you know, the inner aggression
of the human soul, the inner evil of the human soul.

So I think that our parents' reaction was excessive. That that
tranquillity was a false tranquillity. The sunny Rousseauist op-
timism of the Fifties, the normality of the Fifties — that was an
excessive reaction to something that had been excessive. And
then our reaction was excessive to the Fifties, and out of that
came another excess, the conservative backlash. But I think
we're waking up from everything now. It's the end of the century,
it's the end of the millennium, all right? We're reassessing. And
/feel there is something happening. I have been saying my ideas
for twenty years. No one listened. I couldn't get published. I
couldn't get hired. And suddenly, people are listening and un-
derstanding what I'm saying. And it suggests to me that there
is a kind of cyclical pattern at work, and we've gone through a
full cycle, and we're coming back.

DOWNIE: Well, so there was excess, but I'd rather have excess with
passion than no passion.

PAGLIA: But the point is, it self-destructed, and you had a conser-
vative backlash. It's something much worse that happened, okay?
Because law and order must go on. We must have law and
order. We cannot have a situation where everyone does his own
thing. We cannot have rioting in the streets. One has to be
realistic about achieving political aims. What I have learned is
how slowly institutions change. And in fact, if an institution
would change rapidly, that's fascism. I began to realize that
slowness — which I hated when I was young — that the slow, boring
movement of the law in the courts is what prevents mob hysteria
from lynching you, okay? Because I felt it myself. [She is refer-

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

413

ring to the violation of due process at Bennington College.] I
am very obnoxious still, and I'm still — I mean, just yesterday
I was, like, carrying on in a meeting and so on.

But the thing is now I'm more realistic. I understand that
institutions change slowly. So my thing is not now, "We want
the world, we want it now!" My thing is — all right, one year
from now, if I keep on, you know, steadily, two years from now,
it'll change. And I also had to learn how to pick my fights. My
thing was, like, everything! I had endless energy. Ooh, people
think I'm energetic now! I am a shadow, a shadow! I had so
much energy I could stay up all night. And my thing was this
issue! That issue! That issue! Now I've learned how to pick my
fights and also how to present in a way that does not alienate
the very people I need for a consensus in order to get my aim
achieved. And that's maturity. . . .

DOWNIE (in studio): Camille Paglia doesn't look down her academic
nose at television or movies or sports or rock and roll. In fact,
it's just the opposite. Her seven-hundred-page book was written
while she enjoyed them all — sometimes simultaneously! So if
you're tempted to yell at your child for having the stereo or the
television too loud when homework is being done, consider this.

PAGLIA (in Philadelphia): Technology for me — see, this is one of the
ironies of my generation. Our generation was looking to nature
and being very disrespectful about society and about capitalism.
At the same time (laughing), it was the most electronic and electrified
generation in history. I was the first person that I knew to have
a stereo, to go to college with a stereo in 1964. No one had
stereos. Now everyone has every kind of music-making equip-
ment. And I had the earphones — I was completely plugged in.
And this is my attitude toward the world. On the one hand, I
see all of nature and I honor it — the moon, the stars, the planets,
all of that. As an astrologer, I just see it so clearly. But then, I
cannot go anywhere when, you know, I just feel so happy at
home, when I have the TV on and I have the music, the ear-
phones on. I have the telephone, and I have the radio on, and
the wires are crossing the floor, and I'm always tripping over
the wires. And I just feel like I'm in this kind of space capsule,

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VAMPS & TRAMPS

you know. I'm just totally connected to the universe, and I think
that's part of the universality of our vision — the fact that we're
connected into the universe through all this electronic machinery.

DOWNIE: But you're only connecting with an electronic universe,
not the natural one.

PAGLIA: No, not really, because I think that on cable TV you can
flick one channel, and you'll see animals in Africa, you'll see
things in nature. That's the way of God himself, checking in on
what's happening on every possible station in the entire universe!
I think this is definitely the wave of the future. I feel that tech-
nology offers the Western version of expanded consciousness,
all right? Because my ability to simply concentrate with all this
going on, with a sensory flood of stimuli — that is what's different
about my brain, okay, from the brains of the scholars who came
before me. Because one part of my brain is totally rigorous and
analytic in the traditional way. The other part is this electrified
brain that people have found no machine to measure yet. It's
completely lurid. It's like neon. It's like this, all right? (vibrates
hand near head) My ability to think in the face of, incredible noise,
for example — people say, "How can you think with that noise?"
But I can only think when there's noise. I have to flood my senses
in order to really think, all right?

I feel that the brain has many tracks. Everyone in my gen-
eration — for thirty-five years I've been listening to rock music! All
of rock music has gone through this head again and again and
again. It's all in there. And so I feel that I have a track in my
brain. I wake up in the morning, it's playing. It's constantly
playing music, all right? Then I have another one that's a visual
track. So I love to write when I have the earphones on, listening
to music. It could be classical music, it could be movie music —
I love, like, Ben-Hur and all those great scores. It could be rock,
or it's disco, which I love when I'm writing. All kinds of things.
And then I have the soap operas on without the sound, okay?
So I have the sound going very loud, and I have the images
coming into my brain. If I don't have it, I can't concentrate. If
I am trying to write without the sound and without the images,

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

41 5

my mind wanders. I have to supply it. I have to supply the music;
I have to supply the images, okay?

So I'm saying that our brains are completely different. It's
something new, and I think we're moving outward toward that
moment when we leave the earth and go into outer space. Star
Trek was a great phenomenon of my generation. Let's say we
have to take forty years for a person to get from earth to some
planet. People will be born and will live and will die in space
capsules, okay? And it was my generation which was the first,
through this technological machinery, to be able to have a sense
of being a citizen of the universe. We are citizens of the universe.
We have a truly international perspective through TV and
through technology.

It's very interesting: they use metaphors like this in Buddhism
and so on — the idea that the mind should be like a still pond
receiving messages from the universe. That's exactly how I feel
when I'm looking at TV, all right? I go completely blank (sweeps
open hand over face in "cut" gesture), absolutely blank. And that's
why it's so refreshing to me. And I just want to sit there and
go completely blank. Like, after I've had dinner, and I've had
a glass of wine, you know, I'm just sitting there with Enter-
tainment Tonight, and suddenly there's this completely glitzy,
sensationalized story — I just love that! I have such pleasure at
it, okay? And I can feel that it's palpating a part of my brain
that's not the other part of the brain, (goes all daffy I misty, imi-
tating it) You know, there's Liz Taylor, coming out of the hos-
pital again! And it's like that area of sleazy eroticism and so
on. I just feel it, right? The TV is literally an emanation, in some
sense, of the popular mind. I feel that everything on TV is of
interest to me. I love advertisements. I just wrote an essay talk-
ing about ads as an art form. I love (snaps her fingers) the speed
of them —

DOWNIE: But it really is the medium, isn't it? I mean, you're saying
that television itself is important.

PAGLIA: Yes, the medium itself. I love the sleaziest parts of TV. I
mean, some academics like to say, "Oh, yes, I like PBS," or "I

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like these documentaries." (snorts scornfully) That's not my atti-
tude! Or they want to talk ponderously about the problems with
the news programs. Well, that's not what / regard as TV, you
know? I regard TV as this river, (makes flowing motion with hand)
It's like a river of images, okay? Especially now with cable. You
can get like thirty-seven different channels, and you can go . . .
sometimes I just sit there and go zap! (flips imaginary remote control)
Zap! Zap! Zap! It's like an art form, where you have this weird
collage, you see, of completely discontinuous images.

You'll go from the face of a religious figure, you know, holding
the Bible, then suddenly the next thing, a girl dancing with her
boobs hanging out of her bra, like that (raises arms and does a
shimmy). I think, this is fabulous! This is the culture! The way we
have all these strange things which cannot formally come to-
gether — these two figures, the evangelist preacher and the strip-
per, let's say. Those two people can never meet. But television
brings them together. They are both aspects of reality, and
therefore the mind of the person watching TV is this universal
mind. So I feel totally open. I try to have an attitude of total
openness to everything I see. And I have such enjoyment, such
sensuous pleasure of enjoyment, okay, in watching television. And
the colors, the movements, everything about it, everything which
strikes very book-oriented people as tinsely or squalid and so
on. Those very things are exactly why I love TV!

DOWNIE (in studio): From television to belly dancing to striptease to
pornography, Camille Paglia writes and teaches about popular
culture and sexuality. Where is there a place for the sacred in
her world?

PAGLIA (in Philadelphia): I'm saying, in Sexual Personae, that Western
culture has been formed by this tension between the Judeo-
Christian and the Greco-Roman traditions. And that it is not
true that Judeo-Christianity ever defeated paganism. In fact, pa-
ganism went underground and has erupted at various moments:
at the Renaissance, in Renaissance art; in Romanticism; and
now again in modern popular culture. And that paganism does
indeed have a spirituality. In paganism you have a unity be-

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

41 "7

tween sexuality and spirituality, which is a great ideal. Chris-
tianity was not able to do this, because it regards nature as a
fallen realm and our bodies as belonging to that fallen realm.
The soul is, you know, the thing that was created in God's divine
image, so the closer you can come to God, the less sexual you
are. And this produced the monasticism, of course, and celibacy
of the Middle Ages.

So yes indeed, that's what I'm trying to show in my work.
I'm trying to show the actual spiritual vision that's inherent in
this highly eroticized point of view that paganism had, all right?
And it's so difficult for people to understand this. Like I regard
all strip tease or belly dancing today as part of that long line,
coming down from when dance was sacred in the cult around
the Great Mother. This is really true, you know, that belly
dancing is the last remnant of this long tradition going back.
These movements of the hips, the overtly sensual and provoc-
ative pelvic motions of the belly dancer — to provoke (laughs) the
fatigued libido of the various sultans and caliphs — all that goes
back to the temple prostitutes around the Great Mother, in the
ancient Near East and so on.

It's difficult for people trained in Judeo-Christianity to look
at overt sexuality and regard it as in any way having anything
to do with God, all right? But it does. In Hinduism, there are
temples in India which have copulating nude couples, sometimes
threes and fours, on the temple. I am entirely pro-pornography.
When I look at pornography, for example, I see the energies of
nature, all right? For Hinduism, those are creative and fertile
energies. People who look at pornography and see simply
oppression, see male dominance and female submission! —
which, by the way, is completely false about pornography.
That's simply not true. Often it's exactly the reverse.

DOWNIE (in gallery of ancient sculpture): For years, Camille Paglia's
colleagues tried to avoid her, despite having impeccable cre-
dentials from Yale University. She jiist didn't seem to fit in. But
something has happened. Her ideas are now noticed and de-
bated, and not just by academics. Her book, Sexual Personae, is

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available in paperback now, and it continues to sell amazingly
well. But while her ideas are reaching more and more people,
she remains an enigma. And she finds comfort in history.

PAGLIA (in Philadelphia): From my earliest years, I feel I was such
an alienated being — I think from my rebellion against my sex
role in the early Fifties. Right from the start, I felt when as a
tiny child I went to the museum, the Metropolitan Museum,
and I saw the great artifacts from Egypt and so on, I always
felt, from the study of history, that they gave me a kind of
perspective upon my own culture. It allowed me to see my own
identity in a larger frame of reference. And I think that the study
of history has been for me — my early passion was to be an
archaeologist, an Egyptologist — the study of history has been
for me a liberation from the conventions of my own time.

downie: For a lot of people, though, I think history is seen as
something to be overcome, and your point is that it's something
that has to be appreciated and delved into and brought to bear
on what's happening now.

PAGLIA: That's why I see history in huge rhythms, enormously long
rhythms. That's why I think most people are just trapped in the
present. If you don't understand the whole path, you can't see
where we're going, because you don't see where we've been. So
I just see these huge rhythms operating, and I see that popular
culture has been this enormous transformation that happened,
I feel in the 1920s, with the birth of sound pictures. That was
the moment when, I think, high art lost its exclusive status, and
popular culture took over. And I think we're still in this rhythm,
but I believe that we're still in the Romantic rhythm.

My mentor Harold Bloom also believes this, that we're still
in the Romantic era. That is, the movement initiated by Rous-
seau's ideas in 1760. So that's what I see — one long huge pat-
tern. Rock and roll is simply, you know, another eruption of
that Romanticism. I see us still in that. And I think that the
next — to predict, all right? (laughs) — I think the next rhythm will
be inaugurated by someone from outer space. I mean, when —
if — we discover another civilization, another planet, if it turns

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

419

out there's evidence for that, then that's the beginning of a new
phase, I think, when the people of the world, presumably, will
see that we look more like each other than we do like that
creature there which looks like a blob of Jell-O, all right? I think
that that may happen, at a certain point, and I think that that
may terminate the phase we're in. . . . I often feel when I talk
to people who are older than me, a generation older than me,
academics and so on, that their brains are very slow, okay? Very
slow. The speed of my mind is part of the stimulation I have
received from all these sensory things — from rock and roll and
MTV. When MTV came along, I felt it was exactly the way
my brain had been operating for the prior twenty years. Flash!
Flash! Flash!

BOBBITT VERSUS BOBBITT

CNN & Gouvpdiny , January 12, 1994. Host: Mary Tillotson. Guests: Susan
Estrich, Susan Milano, and Camille Paglia (in London). On the ongoing trial
in Virginia of Lorena Bobbitt for severing her husband's penis.

PAGLIA: I have to say I am not surprised at this new evidence [of
Lorena Bobbitt having battered her husband]. I have always
regarded the Bobbitt relationship as a sadomasochistic one on
both sides — both physically and psychologically. And my opinion
remains that, on the one hand, I feel that Lorena Bobbitt com-
mitted a cruel and barbarous act, and a cowardly one, by at-
tacking her husband while he was asleep. I reject any prior claim
of victimization. On the other hand, I have to say, I think this
will be having the effect of a revolutionary act by a woman,
somewhat equivalent to Charlotte Corday killing Marat in his
bath just after the French revolution. . . .

Let me cut in here. I absolutely agree with Susan Estrich
about the vigilantism. It is that. I have to say, however, that at
certain moments of history, when law and order break down,
there may be a need for self-defense. I do not excuse Lorena Bobbitt
for what she did. I think it is criminal and she must go to prison!

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However, we're at a time in the history of women when the old
controls, the old protections — the fathers and the brothers and
so on — are no longer there to protect you against abuse. And
I think we have a return here to that great period at the close
of the Sixties when you had women like Valerie Solanas — So-
ciety for Cutting Up Men — who shot Andy Warhol. I don't
want to praise that act, but I'm all for personal responsibility
and self-reliance again. So on the one hand, I think that Lorena
Bobbitt is a neurotic, that she has to go to prison, but — what
I've always said, you see — she's from a Latin country, and she
has a sense of honor. And when her honor is offended, she acts
on her own. I think there's going to be more of this. . . .

I just don't agree that her life was in danger! What I do
think was going on was a very complex power dynamic. Now
the problem of feminist rhetoric of the last twenty years is that
it's been totally unable to deal with the fact that women are as
aggressive in sexual relationships and as vengeful as menl So
what I think we have here is a wonderful demonstration of the
darkness, irrationality, and turbulence of sex relations and the
inadequacy of the normal victimization rhetoric of feminism. . . .
I don't want a situation where women go after the fact for help
to agencies and so on. I want to allow women to diagnose their
own addiction to a certain kind of s&m relationship — that I be-
lieve is going on here. . . . [re: the recent trial in Los Angeles of
Erik and Lyle Menendez for the murder of their parents] What
I love about that case, the Menendez case, is that it exposes once
again the aggressions, the homicidal urges that Freud — who
was thrown out of feminism twenty years ago — said were in-
herent in all of us. I totally agree: the Menendez case is a fraud.

We can't keep relying simply on the system*. I applaud the
kinds of agencies that are there to give help to desperate women,
but in my opinion it's only a minority of battered women that
in fact are financially dependent on their husbands, and — (fu-
riously) I'm sorry! I reject your figures! And I reject all those
figures of the feminist establishment! It's a bunch of malarkyl
I'm sick and tired — (shouting) I'm sorry\ Until you people begin
to understand the complex psychology of men and women in relation
to each other, more such women are going to be killed or are

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

421

going to cut the penises off their husbands! A woman who stays
after she has been battered — as in this case — is psychologically
addicted to that relationship. She was getting something out of
it too! Until we look to great art — to Bizet's Carmen and things
like that — we're never going to understand that! There was a
love relationship going on here — a love-hate relationship of am-
bivalence. She was not a pure victim!

DIARY: SEX, ART, AND SELLING

From The Guardian, London, January 21, 1994.

Wednesday. At breakfast en route to London, the steward offers
me "bubble and squeak" [a British dish consisting of fried leftovers].
I am dumbfounded and think he is making a sexual proposition.
Vaudeville visions of Gypsy Rose Lee dance before my eyes. On
landing at Heathrow, I am greeted by Sarah Such, the lively head
of publicity at Penguin, who has arranged this tour for the paperback
of Sex, Art, and American Culture. As we drive into the pitch-dark city,
I begin the first of my tutorials in racy British slang. Of the many
pungent words Sarah will add to my vocabulary during my visit,
my favorite is "prat," which I soon publicly apply to the Prince of
Wales.

Caught in traffic near the Basil Street Hotel, we see a strange
stir in front of Harrods, as a dogpack of cameras circles an invisible
prey. Richard Gere is opening the annual sale. "Penguin always
puts me where the action is," I remark. Eighteen months ago, during
my visit for Sexual Personae, my hotel window looked into topsy-turvy
Kensington Palace the week before Andrew Morton's Diana: Her
True Story broke upon the world.

After a few hours' rest, punctuated by fire alarm bells, I begin
my week of interviews, sustained by oceans of Pepsi and Evian and
rafts of scones and exquisite tea sandwiches, which I devour with
obscene relish.

Thursday. I have an unpleasant encounter with the hotel's Euro-
pean hair dryer, which looks like a vacuum cleaner and blasts me

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against the wall with hurricanelike force. The interviews continue,
back to back. By day's end, I have ejected a belligerent reporter for
incoherence and inaccuracy. When informed that this woman is
considered an "expert" on feminism, I reply, "I have gazed into her
mind, and it is mush."

Highlight of the day is my costume session for the "Dressed to
Kill" feature in the Daily Mail. When asked, via transatlantic fax,
about my favorite contemporary designers, I urged that the stylist
find vaguely transvestite Sixties wear, either Diana Rigg Avengers
outfits or Portobello Road historical regalia of dandy or cavalier.
Confronted with a crowded rack, I fall ecstatically on an opulent
purple-velvet Moschino jacket with pearl buttons. Two people are
needed to zip me into the thigh-high black suede boots. I am in
gender-bending heaven.

British news events swirl round us. Every day, some delicious
sex scandal shakes the government. I steal an Evening Standard poster
off the street (LOVE CHILD MINISTER FORCED TO QUIT) to hang in
my Philadelphia office next to my lifesize Babylonian icon of Joanne
Whalley-Kilmer as Christine Keeler.

Friday. The Guardian declares me "a flash in the pan." I eject a
photographer for constructing a hellish oven in which I am expected
to put my head. The Late Show films my predictions for 1994: "Ma-
donna and Diana will be revealed to be one person, a hybrid Hindu
goddess named Madiana. They will withdraw to a Tibetan mon-
astery, run by Richard Gere, to which women and hermaphrodites
can come for flagellation by Madonna and then nursing and healing
by Diana."

We fly to Belfast, where I deliver a lecture at Queen's University.
Here, as elsewhere, I complain about my acute television deprivation
in Europe and the UK — the few channels, the lack of late-night
programming. At a bar afterward, I savour Guinness and marvel
at the extraordinary beauty of Irish youth.

Weekend. We are driven to Dublin by a security-cleared driver of
James Bond expertise. We pass a ruined Doric temple, a bombed-
out courthouse where five policemen were killed. I am fascinated by

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

423

the ancient stone farmhouses and omnipresent sheep of the Irish
countryside.

Arriving at a television studio for the Kenny Live show at 10 P.M.,
we see three handlers struggling with a baby tiger in the street.
Sarah, having forgotten her leash, also fails to get me through the
door, as I carry on about Blake and Bringing Up Baby. I lose a button.
In wardrobe, Sarah heroically sews it on, as I wander about ex-
claiming at boxes labeled "Ladies Bras for Men" and "Ladies Shoes
for Men," the latter containing gigantic, battered pink pumps. On
the show, a caller says I am a combination of "Groucho Marx and
Hitler." The host and I kiss.

Back in London, I film risque presentations for two Channel 4
programs, on the penis and lesbians, following last year's shows on
Diana and Lolita. The artist, Alison Maddex, rightly dubbed my
"inamorata" by the press, arrives from Germany. We feast on par-
tridge, steak and kidney pie, and flagons of ale at Rules, where we
sense positive spirit presences.

Monday. More interviews, leading up to my lecture at the National
Theatre. Alison and I are entranced by a gorgeous Thirties portrait
of Olivier as Hamlet in the green room. Andrew Morton comes
backstage to say hello. We find him wildly handsome but go off on
our own for an Indian cuisine extravaganza.

Tuesday. Elle magazine arrives with costumes for a photo shoot. I
try on gold mail trousers but reject a black-rubber cat suit and red
vinyl dominatrix thigh boots. I select a studded black leather jacket
and motorcycle boots and pose with a medieval broadsword. I feel
like Mel Gibson in Mad Max. The South Bank Show interviews me
about the changing image of fat women in cultural history. I am
aggravated as reporters claim my "chic" jet black suit was "navy."

Later that week. Alison and I visit Hampton Court, Vivienne West-
wood's shop, and a chocolate-wall art exhibit. We see Oleanna
(tedious but all-too-true) and Medea (electrifying), after which I send
a thank-you note backstage to Diana Rigg, one of my heroines.

424

VAMPS & TRAMPS

The Sunday Times compares mc to Dame Edna Everage, which
is, as Sarah would say, spot on. I thank the ghost of Coco Chanel
that the cover photo definitively documents my maligned black
suit. Alison and I fly back to America. The moment I get home, I
rush through the house, turning on all three of my television sets
at once.

EXTRACTS

"A gentleman is . . . "from Esquire, Spring-Summer 1993.

The idea of the modern "gentleman" is a product of British
culture. It originates in the Italian Renaissance, in Baldassare Cas-
tiglione's The Courtier, a. handbook of elegant aristocratic manners.
The gentleman is half feminine. Though he may be a warrior or
athlete, he has smoothed and softened his masculine aggression for
indoor politicking. Because of his refinement and attentiveness, the
gentleman is always highly attractive to women and is often a skilled
seducer.

Film history is full of great gentlemen, from Fred Astaire and
Cary Grant to George Hamilton, whose persona tends toward the
gigolo. Hugh Hefner has never received the credit he deserves for
creating a sophisticated model of the suave American gentleman in
the Marlboro Man years following shoot-'em-up World War II.
Contemporary feminism has tried to ditch male gallantry and chiv-
alry as reactionary and sexist. Eroticism has suffered as a result.
Perhaps it's time to bring the gentleman back. He may be the only
hero who can slay that mythical beast, the date-rape octopus, cur-
rently strangling American culture.

425

426

VAMPS & TRAMPS

From The Washington Post Book World, Christmas feature, 1992.
Writers were asked what books they would read over the holidays, what books
they hoped to write, and what books influenced them in childhood.

No current books will be read by me for some time, since I am
still making my way, with heavy sighs and a magnifying glass,
through Madonna's Sex. As for planned books of my own, it would
be too cruel to spoil the holiday season with dark visions of future
Paglia tomes, portable only by wheelbarrow.

However, I eagerly answer the query about the ultimate book
of my childhood. It was the boxed set of Lewis Carroll's Alice books,
a special edition with tinted Tenniel illustrations, published by Ran-
dom House in 1946. The contrasting wear of the two tattered vol-
umes clearly shows that it was Through the Looking- Glass, rather than
Alice in Wonderland, that most obsessed me as a child.

The Alice books were my bible, and I studied them religiously.
They have a dreamy, hallucinatory quality. Order and chaos oscil-
late. Time and space melt. Vivid personalities, cantankerous and
egotistical, appear as humans, animals, plants, and assorted objects,
including a leg of mutton in a paper hat. Everything in the universe
is capable of cryptic, bossy speech.

The curt, explosive sound of Carroll's sentences seemed to echo
the choppy, vigorous Italian dialects I heard all around me as a
child but was unable to understand. I probably identified the rum-
pled, sweet-tempered White Queen and the forceful, dogmatic Red
Queen with, respectively, my paternal and maternal grandmothers,
the stately matriarchs to whom I dedicated Sexual Personae.

Alice was a model heroine for a small child. Isolated, plucky, and
inquisitive, she wanders through gleaming drawing rooms, tangled
gardens, and rough forests with a kind of baffled stoicism. At five,
I was Alice for Halloween, in a pinafore, apron, and yellow-yarn wig
made by my mother. My other admirations were male: Prince Val-
iant, Robin Hood, and Bizet's Escamillo. The observant and quietly
determined Alice would remain my ruling female persona until my
adolescent passion for Katharine Hepburn and Amelia Earhart. In
college, I rediscovered Carroll's arch, haughty rhetoric in Oscar Wilde
and my potent, ultraverbal new allies, gay men and drag queens.

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

427

"I, the Jury," from The Washington Post Book World, December 5,
1993. Writers were asked to make nominations for the Nobel Prize for Liter-
ature.

The Nobel Peace Prize has not been awarded in years where
it wasn't deserved. A similar standard should govern the litera-
ture prize, in which case there would have been no winners for
the past twenty years. The declining importance of the written
word in our age of mass media is all too eloquently expressed in
the diminishing distinction of winners of the literature prize after
the high period of Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), Samuel Beckett (1969),
and Pablo Neruda (1971). The literature prize, a relic of a gen-
teel pre-modernist era, should be abolished or redefined as a cul-
ture prize. Artists of far greater achievement and world stature
than recent Nobel prizewinners are Ingmar Bergman, Federico
Fellini, and Bob Dylan. If we must stick to literature, I say give
the prize to our brilliant Beat shaman, Allen Ginsberg. I'd love
to see Ginsberg disrupt the pompous Nobel ceremony with one of
his trademark pieces of performance art — cross-legged, incense-
burning, cymbal-clanging, and chanting some mystical ode of juicy
gay porn.

* * *

Paglia has publicly condemned "advance blurbs 3 ' as a corrupt practice of the
publishing industry, and she refuses to write them. However, she occasionally
provides comments after a book is published, and these have appeared (along
with phrases from her book reviews) on paperback editions.

For the Doubleday/Anchor reissue in 1992 of Leslie Fiedler's
Love and Death in the American Novel (1960):

Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown, and Allen Ginsberg were
the three central literary figures of the American Sixties. In college, I
read Fiedler intensely and deeply. Love and Death in the American Novel
is immediately behind my book Sexual Personae. In it, Fiedler made
the first important synthesis of practical criticism with psycho-
analysis and progressive politics. He created an American intellec-
tual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French
theory in the Seventies and Eighties. Let's turn back to Fiedler and
begin again.

428

VAMPS & TRAM PS

For the New American Library paperback edition of Gordon F.
Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Alan
(1992):

Rod Serling was one of the central creators of twentieth-century
American imagination. He was a sci-fi visionary, surrealist poet, and
political moralist. The impact of The Twilight Zone on my Sixties
generation was like that of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Samuel
Beckett's Waiting for Godot on the two generations before us. Serling
was a primary inspiration to me as a writer. I revere him as the
modern heir of Edgar Allan Poe.

* * *

From The Essential Frankenstein, ed. Leonard Wolf Penguin > 1993.

I have always found Frankenstein, in its book and movie versions,
profoundly and unpleasantly disturbing because of my identification
with the split personae of the story. In Dr. Frankenstein I felt my
detached scientific consciousness, that cool observing eye that I cast
on human behavior from my preschool years. In the monster I sensed
my alienated sexuality, which began with the gender dysfunction of
my childhood and continued through the ambiguities of sexual ori-
entation that still trouble me today. The monster has my uncouth
brute power and psychological isolation, and in its challenge to and
flight from authority I saw my own Romantic affronts to the con-
formist humanitarian values of the ''community." But Frankenstein's
mode is horror, while mine is comedy. I found my way out of Mary
Shelley's existential dilemma by rejecting Aristotle's "fear and pity"
for Aristophanes' bawdy, vital energy.

* * *

From The New York Observer, July 5-12, 1993. Dan Cogan asks celeb-
rities about memories of summer camp.

I went to Spruce Ridge Camp in the Adirondacks and Lourdes
Summer Camp, a Catholic camp. For me, these all-women envi-
ronments were prelesbian heaven. It was just so romantic. I had
mad crushes on all the counselors. It was fabulous, a paradise
state.

At one camp I had a male name briefly. I had just taken the
confirmation name Anastasia, after the movie. You're supposed to

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

429

name yourself after a saint, so I named myself after Ingrid Bergman.
I began calling myself Stacy, already an androgynous name. Some-
one got it wrong and called me Stanley, and I liked that, so I was
called Stanley that summer. It was great.

Outside of my normal school environment, where you would
have to wear a skirt or a dress or a gym uniform, I really could be
my androgynous, butch self for days on end. It's probably why I
felt happy while I was there. The way I've always gotten attention
from women is by being funny. Camp was the only place you could
get sustained attention from pretty girls. People like to criticize me,
saying, "Oh, she's such a showboat," but that's one of the things I
developed to get attention from women. I can't get them into bed,
but I could still get their attention. And I'm sure camp was pivotal.

But it was still a very innocent age. Today, I think I would have
been much more physically aggressive than I was. There were a
million opportunities to do things, for heaven's sake. There was some
experimentation, sitting in bed and pretending we were boys with
each other. It was very hot. Things were never that hot again. I
don't think counselors would have permitted it if they knew what
was going on.

But this is also one of my primary alien experiences. The idea
of everyone sitting around the campfire and singing "Que Sera Sera,"
Doris Day's greatest hit. It is one of the experiences that formed
my temper as the kind of totally obnoxious person that I am now,
my total intolerance for sappy sentimentality and handholding. I
hate campfire singing. To me, it typifies the Fifties. The false
gemutlichkeit of these camps is part of what formed my rebellion as
a Sixties revolutionary. It's why I love Keith Richards.

And of course I created some incidents. The biggest happened
when it was my task to deal with the latrine at Spruce Ridge. The
instructions on the five-pound bag of lime that was handed to me
said to put half a cup into the latrine. I thought it said half a package.
So I dumped in half the bag. Well, I know enough about chemistry
now to know what happened. Methane gas is produced by decay.
The lime exploded as soon as it hit the gas in the latrine, and I was
flung out backwards and clouds and clouds of white-brownish smoke
were pouring out of the latrine upwards past the unsullied pine trees
into the heavens. And I was so stunned, I thought, God, what's

430

VAMPS & TRAMPS

happening, because in those days you didn't know anything. And
I jumped onto a fallen tree to warn people, and it was so moss-
covered that my legs flew out from under me, and I fell about eight
feet down, BOOM!, and I lay there stunned, watching the clouds
go and go and go. It was just endless. I knew I would be in trouble.

That was a very archetypal experience. It symbolized everything
I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and
explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine
of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology and
so on, and I would drop the bomb into it. I would terrorize everyone,
create complete disorder, and then I'd be lying on my back watching
the explosion that I made rise helplessly into the sky.

* * *

"Critical Mass Media,"^om the PEN Newsletter, October 1993. Mem-
bers of PEN were asked what motivated them as writers in today's changing
world.

My primary inspiration remains the rebellion of my Sixties gen-
eration against bourgeois convention. So many of my contemporaries
lost themselves in drugs or dissipated their energies outside the
system, which they refused to enter and therefore never transformed.
Television and popular music shaped the imagination of my gen-
eration, but the academic and literary establishment is still domi-
nated by dull, moralistic, slow-thinking people who came to con-
sciousness fifty years ago, before the triumph of mass media.

As a writer, I am committed to the enterprise of setting down
my generation's inner experience for the historical record. Not since
Gutenberg, as Marshall McLuhan observed, had there been such a
dizzying communications explosion. Since the Sixties there has been
a radical shift from words to images in world culture. The modern
writer must be able to negotiate between these realms. Like Alexan-
drian scribes, we carry the sacred burden of the literary past in a
lively, decadent, commercial age increasingly indifFerent to books. But
I remain convinced that words have both power and permanence.

* * *

From "Symposium — In the Media, A Woman's Place " Columbia Media
Studies Journal, Winter/ Spring, 1993.

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

43 1

In the past two years, feminism exploded into the media and
became hot news again. But the serious, legitimate issues of date
rape and sexual harassment were done to death and turned into
mass hysteria. Feminist books became best-sellers, but they also
exposed deep divisions within feminism itself that the media had
lazily ignored. For twenty years, dissident feminist voices like mine
could not get heard. From the moment Gloria Steinem founded Ms.
magazine and became a power on the New York social and political
scene, the media servilely surrendered to the white, middle-class
lady's view of feminism, which many of us from the Sixties found
genteel, sanitized, and repressive.

Since my recent notoriety, I have had many opportunities to
observe the inner workings of the major media. With few exceptions,
the sloth, superficiality and ignorance about long-standing feminist
issues are not to be believed. Media people just repeat the simplistic
Steinem party line like robots. Catharine MacKinnon, a puritanical
anti-porn extremist endorsed by Steinem, is trotted out on program
after program as if she were Grandma Moses. I am constantly bat-
tling to get the opposing position heard and have pulled out of several
network shows when producers began to buckle under hardline pres-
sure. And there are many programs and major print organs that are
completely closed to me.

My message to the media is: Wake up! The silencing of authentic
debate among feminists just helps the rise of the far right. When the
media get locked in their Northeastern ghetto and become slaves of
the feminist establishment and fanatical special interests, the Amer-
ican audience ends up looking to conservative voices for common
sense. As a libertarian Democrat, I protest against this self-defeating
tyranny of political correctness.

* * *

From In A Word: A Harper's Magazine Dictionary of Words That
Don't Exist But Ought To, Jack Hitt, ed., 1992. Contributors were asked
to invent, define, and illustrate a new word.

whuffle [whine + wheeze + snuff + sniffle]: The annoying, scratchy
sound made by weepy feminists as they lament the sufferings of
women and, houndlike, sniff out evidence of male oppression in
literature, art, and the media. Some compare it to the rustle of

432

VAMPS & TRAMPS

Victorian crinoline skirts. Others speak of a badmintonlike spank
and whoosh. Still others think of a jumbled feathery flapping, as in
the attic torture of Tippi Hedrcn in The Birds. Of a feminist theorist:
"She whuffled her way to the top." Of a feminist conference: "The
room overflowed with whufflers." Of a feminist lecture: "The whuf-
fling was unbearable."

* * *

Letter to the editor, London Review of Books, March 11, 1993. Reprinted
in Harper's, June 1993.

Elaine Showalter's review of my new book, Sex, Art, and American
Culture, was generally fair and accurate in its detailed overview of
my career. However, her account of my appearance in December at
her own institution, Princeton University, is a dismaying collage of
distortions, malice, and wishful fantasy.

I have never in fact been invited to lecture at Princeton, partly
because of the solipsistic insularity of the feminist establishment that
Elaine Showalter represents. I was not giving a lecture at Princeton
on the day in question. I had been invited by Alisa Belletini, producer
of MTV's "House of Style," to sit on a 40-minute panel with her,
supermodel Cindy Crawford, and Linda Wells, founder and editor-
in-chief of Allure magazine, to help defend them against the insane
feminist charge (obsessively pushed by one-note Naomi Wolf) that
the fashion industry causes anorexia.

As one of four panelists focused on a single issue, I could hardly
jump to my feet, take over the occasion, and regale the audience
with my usual Joan-Rivers-meets-Jane-Harrison comic monologue.
Had I done so, I expect Professor Showalter would have used that
as evidence of my dreadful selfishness and daffy narcissism. Here,
as in her books, she shows her inability to read simple cultural
symbolism. At Princeton I was dressed in casual butch blue jeans,
rather than my usual ultra-femme, high-maquillage, Auntie Mame
performance drag, to signal that I was not the central focus: Cindy
Crawford was. It was for the gorgeous, willowy Crawford, not me,
that the huge crowd paid a $5 entrance fee.

I suggest that Professor Showalter, who was clearly stung by
the respectful coverage my attendance at the conference received

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

433

before and after the event in The New York Times and New Jersey
newspapers on and off campus, should concentrate her energies on
the deplorable condition of Princeton education. We visitors were
shocked at the mediocrity and inarticulateness of most of the stu-
dent questioners, who seemed to have no command even of syn-
tax, much less thought, aside from their parroting of passe feminist
cliches. Ivy League education in the humanities is obviously in
the pits.

In conclusion, Professor Showalter tries to make a grand point
of my refusal to 6 'debate" other academic feminists — as if I had ever
been invited by anyone anywhere in the country to such a debate
(except for a Madonna panel at this student-organized confer-
ence). The unpleasant truth is that the American feminist establish-
ment categorically refused to read my book or to take me or my
ideas seriously until now, three full years after the release of Sexual
Personae.

I'm afraid it's too late, ladies. You have abundantly shown your
true character, in all its vicious, Kremlin-walled Stalinism. The
reform movement that I helped launch is at your gates. Your desire
for debate is touching, even pathetic. But the time for negotiations
is long past. History has moved on and left you behind.

* * *

"On Picasso," from Art News, April 1993.

On the level of creativity, Picasso is equal to Michelangelo.
Therefore it's appalling that feminists have removed him from study
for women artists, who are brainwashed that he was mean to his
girlfriends. Yes, mainstream and radical feminists are anti-Picasso.
You can't treat him seriously, they claim. This is absolute nonsense.
They're blind to a vital fact: you must separate the person in real
life from the artist.

Now, we may be interested in biographical compulsions, but
art — I stress — exists separately from real life. Young women in Ivy
League schools are told art history was written by men, so there's
a heterosexist conspiracy to keep them from knowing about women
artists in history. We've revised the reputation of some minor women
artists I find interesting. Romaine Brooks. I've always liked her.
Frida Kahlo. Fine. But not one major woman artist has ever been

434

VAMPS & TRAMPS

rediscovered. Then Germaine Greer says there are no great women
because they have mutilated egos. I say great art only comes from
mutilated egos.

Western culture is about the solitary, obsessive individualist.
Usually artists of non-Western traditions subordinate themselves to
collective style and "speak" for the tribe. In Michelangelo and Pi-
casso we see Western art and personality. Everything that is Western
about cultural history is encapsulated in Picasso.

* * *

From interview by Edie Magnus with Camille Paglia on premiere of Connie
Chung's Eye to Eye, CBS, June 17, 1993, in regard to sexual harassment
lawsuits against schools by parents on behalf of their children.

paglia: Well, I think it's a very dangerous trend — very dangerous
indeed.

MAGNUS (voiceover): Writer and controversial social critic Camille
Paglia sees a danger in the surge of laws which might appear
fashionable now but which she feels undermine the kids they're
designed to protect.

PAGLIA: The idea of the state and the law stepping in to make sure
everyone's feelings are not bruised — this is madness.

If the girl's feeling's aren't hurt now, they will be hurt some
time in the future — again and again and again. If you haven't
built up the armor to deal with some reverse in junior high
school — what are we doing to people? We are crippling them.
We are crippling our young women!

(Program continues.)

PAGLIA: We cannot have constant legal remedies for every single
thing that goes wrong with kids in junior high school.

MAGNUS: What would you say to the eighth grade girl who comes
home crying every day, whose grades have fallen, who says she
cannot concentrate enough to be able to get a good education
because the boys in school are calling her dirty names?

SATIRES AND SHORT TAKES

435

PAGLIA: I have to ask: is it happening in the classroom? If it's hap-
pening in the classroom, that cannot be tolerated. If it's hap-
pening outside the classroom, tough cookies, okay? Get a grip.
This is called life. L-I-F-E is life. We cannot constantly make
a kind of cushion around our white middle-class girls (makes ear-
muff gesture and mimics sulky adolescent), protecting them from any
obscene thing that comes to their ears!

APPENDICES

CARTOON PERSONAE
A MEDIA CHRONICLE

6. Movie poster for. Female Misbehavior (1992). A. Piccolo Graph-
ics/NYC. From Part 1, "Dr. Paglia" (above); from Part 3,
"Bondage'' (below). First Run Features.

'You have an air of Camille Paglia about you. "

Fig. 7. Camille Paglia: her operatic tough-girl voice rings out into the
cloistered academic air. Drawing by Victor Juhasz originally ap-
peared in The New Yorker. Copyright © 1992 by Victor Juhasz.
All rights reserved.

Fig. 8. Drawing by Victoria Roberts originally appeared in
The New Yorker. Copyright © 1993 by Victoria Roberts.

Pa^&a. to wan, pVaax . ?

NFORHATIOH

"/ read that Camille Pallia was writing the preface
to Madonna's new book . . . or was it the other way around?''

Fig. 9. Drawing by Gail E. Machlis originally appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle. Copyright ® 1992 Chronicle Features Syndica

Fig. 10. Drawing by Carole Cable originally appeared in the
Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright c 1994. Reprinted by
permission of University of Texas Press.

Fig. 1 1 . Drawing by Doug Sneyd reproduced by special
permission of Playboy magazine. Copyright ® 1993 by Playboy.

Fig. 12. Drawing by Demetrios Psillos originally appeared in
Self magazine. Copyright ® 1993 by Demetrios Psillos.

Fig. 13. Copyright © 1993 by Bill Holbrook. Reprinted with
special permission of King Features Syndicate.

Fig. 14. Originally appeared in The New York Native.
Copyright © 1992 by C. Bard Cole.

Fig. 15. Paglia as St. Sebastian. Originally appeared in
The New Republic. Copyright © 1992 by Vint Lawrence.

Fig. 16. Paglia with Madonna and fig leaf. Originally appeared
The New Republic. Copyright © 1993 by Vint Lawrence.

Fig. 17. Paglia as Diva. Drawing by Charles Hcfling originally
appeared in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review.
Copyright e 1994 by Charles C. Hefling.

CULTURAL JETLAG— JIM SIERGEY & TOM ROBERTS

TOCW/OCHGOEST IS CJWflU PAG4JA,
\AJW$e POOiC *S EXUA L PSKSOMAE Z A STT

Ahto pecApence prom hiefEftrm to

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IAi pApeftBAOC. \*ieLCOAA£, Mf. PAGUAIm

mm

iCOmSPtL
M£AK
HERE

Fig. 18. Copyright © 1992 by Tom Roberts and Jim Siergey.
Nationally syndicated in alternative newspapers.

CULTURAL JETLAG — JIM SIERGEY & TOM ROBERTS

AiRtGnr,As yoo can see bv t*m»s cmaet

SALCS of TUES£X Book AK£ Tto
TBEAiO OOfMf NOW, I DIDN'T GBT

~" 7 KOTO TUts BoSWeSS To SfT

g-L o*i 4 P/U£ Of p£ADMON£.Y,
SO t'O APPRECIATE SOME

iPBAS.'f

SANPRA, IT WAS VDi/ft
&IG I PEA to go w/TM
rue wmolc 4£$8/AAf

TUWG, W/Mt's YOUI?

4grr brainstorm f>

Fig. 19. Copyright © 1993 by Tom Roberts and Jim Siergey.
Nationally syndicated in alternative newspapers.

WAS A NtffZMAl

<?u$z. iirru otsu. "Apunk. 9
seems uue. cmui ve^fa*y

JNST LCHGAMCH6
THE C*fS <?f

Fig. 20. Inspired by Paglia's A/(wfcrH essay on revivals.

Her books are shown in frame 7. Drawing by Mick Kidd and
Chris Garratt. Copyright © 1994 by BIFF Products.
Originally appeared in The Guardian, London.

(Deep w tk ctfA\;/vs€ of
£(zicev Come it) a TfrJ&zst-

a

DOWM AT TM 6* D V N'A"

| AMD/ (&M

A hQvAN"
V/OODoo i

ownJ AT T\ve OLD OfWVSUS X N'

'aequo gAtz %GQiue-

,s a a

to exruxif tvv deep
eccetfe* of tw' io

STUFF

MS APotto /mv eve*

AM APeoiMT*&4T 1 OIONVWS IS
WITH J^*^

<?f2(FFY'WAlT R>(2
I /^CNTAL IMA6

TS*. Too SAD. A*0<J*JTff
Bar, i 6^e*S *aiheu I uMteoa*\

VDv'fZeNOT IN T>J'
AiOO^Vou PC NOT

Figs. 21, 22, & 23. Three strips inspired by SVjwa/ Personae.
Copyright c 1992 by Bill Griffith. Reprinted with special
permission of King Features Syndicate.

Dykes To Watch Out For

Fig. 24. Copyright ® 1992 by Bill Griffith. Reprinted with special
permission of King Features Syndicate.

Fig. 25. The box contains copies of Paglia's Sex, Art, and American
Culture. Excerpt from the ongoing strip courtesy of
Firebrand Books. Copyright ® 1994 by Alison Bechdel.

SetAe&rrtes SeerAS (ike.
&\e oh// CLdLequLCLte. response.

Fig. 26. Poster of Sex, Art, and American Culture in superheroine's
room in The Maxx comic books. Copyright ® 1993 by Sam Kieth.

Fig. 27. Copyright ® 1993 by Raymond Lowry.
Originally appeared in The Guardian, 1993.

Figs. 28 & 29. Copyright © 1993 by John Callahan.
Reprinted by permission. Gift of the artist.

Figs. 30 & 31. Copyright © 1993 by John Callahan.
Reprinted by permission. Gift of the artist.

Fig. 32. Gloria Steinem aboard drifting ship; Paglia as Siren.
Copyright © 1993 by John Callahan. Reprinted by permission.

Fig. 33. Paglia as Samson — the final caricature as published in
the San Francisco Examiner. Copyright © 1992 by Zach Trenholm.
Reprinted by permission.

Fig. 34. Paglia as Marlon Brando — the original caricature that
was rejected by the San Francisco Examiner as "unsuitable for a
family newspaper." Copyright © 1992 by Zach Trenholm.
Reprinted by permission.

Figs. 35-39. Preliminary sketches for the San Francisco Examiner
caricature: Paglia as bull in china shop, Byzantine evangelist,

Venus de Dietrich, bikini-barbell powerlifter, and La Pasionaria.

Copyright ® 1992 by Zach Trenholm. Reprinted by permission.

-THE: ADVENTURES ~ CAMILLE PAGLIA

Fig. 40. Gift from the staff of Penthouse Comix. Presented to
Paglia by George Caragonne at Bob Guccione's Manhattan
townhouse. Copyright 1994 by CDI. Drawn by Bill Vallely and
written by George Caragonne, editor in chief of Penthouse Comix.

A MEDIA CHRONICLE

Selected articles regarding Camille Paglia. The bibliography of
Sex, Art, and American Culture ended with June 1992. The bibliography
of Vamps & Tramps picks up from that point, with some earlier
additions. Annotations by Paglia.

"Afy Name's Camille Paglia," Philadelphia, February 1992. Article
with photos of the two feminist/astrologer Camille Paglias, unknown
to each other until one wrote Sexual Personae. When Lesbo A-Go-Go,
a troupe of lesbian go-go dancers from Washington, D.C., tried to
contact pro-porn professor Paglia to defend them on Donahue, they
reached the other one by mistake. The latter then appeared on the
show (November 1991) and attacked the dancers from the anti-porn
feminist position. Author Paglia tells Philadelphia, "It's like that ep-
isode on The Twilight Zone where Vera Miles meets her double in
the deserted bus depot."

"Female Problems at Brown," Heterodoxy, May 1992. The satirical
anti-p.c. newspaper quotes a Stalinist broadside by feminist English
department faculty at Brown University denouncing Paglia's ap-

457

458 APPENDICES

pcarancc there in March 1992, which they boycotted and which
drew one of the largest crowds in 30 years.

"Camille Paglia: 'As feministas vulgarizam a grandeza da mulher':
Uma das provocates da polemica professora da Philadelphia's
University of the Arts ," Jo rna I da Tarde (Brazil), May 12, 1992. Big
spread on Paglia.

Joan Juliet Buck, 'The Annette Effect," Vanity Fair, June 1992.
Cover story on Annette Bening: "Now she's reading Camille Paglia,
and finds the concept of 'humanist rather than feminist' to be at-
tractive. 'Nature comes first.' "

Kathy Healy, "The New Strippers," Allure, June 1992. Paglia de-
fends stripping.

"Speech Codes and Censors," Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1992. Ed-
itorial about assaults on free speech on American campuses. Con-
demns the campaign against Sexual Personae by feminist faculty at
Connecticut College.

"College reading list causes controversy," Chronicle of Higher Edu-
cation, June 17, 1992. On the furor over Sexual Personae at Connecticut
College.

"The Real Camille," QW (New York), June 21, 1992. A gay mag-
azine prints vicious false allegations about Paglia, whose long, angry
letter in response appeared July 19.

Emily Harrison Weir, "The Academic Dominatrix: Camille Paglia's
Incendiary Cultural Criticism," NewsSmith (Smith College), Summer
1992. Account of Paglia's lecture in April at Smith.

Katherine Farrish, "Tempest over a summer selection: Anti-feminist
book has college in uproar," The Hartford Courant, July 12, 1992.
Account of the controversy at Connecticut College over Sexual Per-
sonae, which some professors called "trash." Janet Gezari, the col-
lege's director of women's studies, says about Sexual Personae, "Let's

A MEDIA CHRONICLE

459

not be fooled by packaging into mistaking any hate-speech or sexist
or racist doctrine for ideas."

Spy parody issue of The New York Times, July 15, 1992. Distributed
as a prank at the Democratic National Convention in New York
City. Headline: "Perot Set to Pick TV's Oprah Winfrey as Running
Mate." On the op-ed page are parodies of articles by Paglia, Anna
Quindlen, A.M. Rosenthal, and Michael Dukakis. The Paglia piece,
written by Jamie Malanowski, is the lead, "A Hot-Button Candidate:
Seeing Clinton as Slick Willie and Liking It." A montage shows
Clinton in a jeweled white Elvis suit.

"Women We Love," Esquire, August 1992. Listed as "Bad Girls for
Good Times": Drew Barrymore and Camille Paglia.

Robert Rockwood, "The Emperor Is Naked: Baring the Truth Be-
hind NAMBLA's Bad Press," NAME LA Bulletin, July /August 1992.
Magazine of the controversial North American Man/Boy Love As-
sociation. Long excerpt from Sexual Personae about what Rockwood
correctly summarizes as "an underlying religious impulse" in the
ancient cult of the beautiful boy.

"Camille Paglia," Current Biography, August 1992. Cover story. Vis-
ible in photo of Paglia in her office: poster of Madonna in a black
bra; photo of porn king Jeff Stryker, clipped from a gay newspaper.

Camille Paglia, "The Diana Cult: What's really behind our obsession
with the Princess of Wales?" New Republic, August 3, 1992. Cover
story. Reprinted in The Guardian (London), The Globe and Mail (To-
ronto), and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Robert F. Moss, "The 1992 Literary Olympics," New York, August
10, 1992. Fantasy athletic contests for literati: "Freestyle Repartee"
at the "Dorothy Parker Pavilion" and, "the glamour event," "Lit-
erary Feuding" at the "Lillian Hellman/Mary McCarthy Arena."
Paglia versus Sontag proposed for the latter. Same issue: Marilyn
Webb, "The Right Course." Announces that fall's five-night lecture
series on feminism at the 92nd Street Y, with Gloria Steinem the

460

APPENDICES

first week and Paglia the second. [It was at this event that Steinem,
presiding onstage with Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, was caught
by the 60 Minutes cameras declaring to the audience about Paglia,
"We don't give a shit what she thinks!"] Paglia says, "My brand
of feminism is totally unlike establishment feminism" [a term, along
with "feminist establishment," that she coined].

Joseph P. Kahn and Mark Muro, "Woody: The fall of a Hollywood
icon," The Boston Globe, August 20, 1992. Paglia calls the Woody
Allen scandal "a wonderful cold douche for feminist naivete" [ap-
parently the first appearance of that slang term in the Globe].

Richard Weizel, "College Reading List Provokes Debate," The New
York Times, Connecticut supplement, August 23, 1992. Account of
the controversy over Sexual Personae at Connecticut College. Paglia
is described as a "renegade feminist" [a term first applied to her by
Diane Sawyer on ABC's Primetime Live]. Janet Gezari, director of
the college's women's studies program, calls Paglia "a woman hater"
and says, "She is a misogynist in the best tradition of Western
misogyny. And we should not be recommending that students read
books that present those kinds of opinions about women." Weizel
states: "[Gezari] said she strongly opposed the book's inclusion on
the summer reading list and took part in an organized effort to have
it removed because the book 'is racist and sexist and just doesn't
belong on a list of books that this college should be recommending.'
She said she agreed with some professors who compared it to Hitler's
Mein Kampf." A male professor says of Sexual Personae, "Besides, it's
just a bad book from a literary point of view and it shouldn't be
read by students. What really strikes me about the book is that both
conservatives and liberals have blasted it. That must tell you some-
thing." [Gee whiz! A book that thinks for itself.] Lauren H. Klatzkin,
the student who originally suggested Sexual Personae, "said she was
appalled by the efforts to have it removed. T was really shocked so
many people got so upset about it. The view of feminism expressed
in the book may not be fashionable these days, but it is a true form
of expression and one as worthy of discussion as any other form.' "

James Wolcott, "Paglia's Power Trip," Vanity Fair, September 1992.
Profile of Paglia, with schoolday photos of her as Cleopatra, Amelia

A MEDIA CHRONICLE

461

Earhart, and Clyde Barrow. Headline: "Since the publication two
years ago of her slash-and-burn manifesto, Sexual Personae, Camille
Paglia has been bullying her way around the intellectual circuit,
ambushing the new feminism — and almost single-handedly resur-
recting the pop-cult debate. Now the woman who compares herself
favorably to Simone de Beauvoir and Madonna is busy promoting
herself as the female role model of the next century." Photo by James
Hamilton (who shot Paglia as bantam-weight super-dyke for The
Village Voice in 1991) of a vampy, cleavage-baring Paglia and her
handsome African- American "Centurions," bodyguards Rennard
Snowden and Brian Roach.

Lynn Hirschberg, "Strange Love," Vanity Fair, September 1992.
Profile of rock diva Courtney Love, who says about her "Kinder-
whore" style of dress and makeup, "It's a good look. It's sexy, but
you can sit down and say, 'I read Camille Paglia.' "

Reed Woodhouse, "Hitting 'em with her best shot: Camille Paglia
and Bay Windows' Reed Woodhouse have a nice long chat," Bay
Windows (Boston), September 3, 1992. Part two appeared September
10. Paglia considers Woodhouse one of the most cultivated and
knowledgeable interviewers she has encountered. Also in second
issue: the lesbian office manager's editorial, "Camille Paglia: A Dan-
gerous Woman," which calls Paglia a "misogynist," groups her with
ultra-conservatives like Pat Buchanan, and scolds gay men for liking
her.

Chris Culwell, "Camille Unbound: Bitchy academic pushes every-
one's buttons," The Sentinel (San Francisco), September 10, 1992.
Paglia quoted under a photo of Michel Foucault: "Foucault is one
of the most misogynist writers of the past 100 years; there isn't a
single woman anywhere in his books." Asked what she was "trying
to accomplish" with Sexual Per sonae, Paglia replies: "Ultimately, I'm
trying to record how the mind works. The book is not about fixed
ideas. It's about the epic struggle between the Apollonian — the form-
making aspect of mankind — and the Dionysian, between reason and
nature, mind and emotion. The book shows the Apollonian dissolv-
ing into the Dionysian, back and forth in this kind of rhythmic,

462

APPENDICES

oscillating motion. I call the book psychedelic because it's inspired
by the kind of thing we were doing in the Sixties. My book is doing
what people had to take acid to do; it's exploring parts of the brain
we don't ordinarily use in everyday life." [The only reviewer who
caught the rhythmic oscillations and critique of polarities in Sexual
Personae was Pat Lee, "The Eyes Have It," Yorkshire Post, April 12,
1990.]

Roger Kimball, "Dragon Lady of Academe," The Wall Street Journal,
September 17, 1992. Review of Sex, Art, and American Culture. Says
about Paglia's academic expose "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raid-
ers": "Don't look for moderation or understatement here. This is
criticism as an exercise in saturation bombing."

Elizabeth Tippens, "Mastering Madonna," Rolling Stone, September
17, 1992. Courses at various schools around the country that make
use of Madonna, including Paglia's "Women and Sex Roles" at the
University of the Arts.

Tim Appelo and Meredith Berkman, "Fighting Words," Entertain-
ment Weekly, September 18, 1992. The Paglia versus Sontag battle.
" 'There's a jealousy factor here,' Paglia snorts. 'I'm saying, "You're
the heavyweight who used to be the bully on the block and here
comes the new girl!" ' " Describes incident at a Philadelphia Ma-
donna concert where "a young male peed on her seat" and Paglia
punched him in the face. [Paglia said to herself, "This is ridiculous!
I'm a 40-year-old woman with a purse!"]

Robert L. Pincus, "Paglia's 'Sex, Art' essays infuriate and/or en-
thrall," The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 20, 1992. Review by
an art critic: "Her attacks on the American academy's obsession
with French theorists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are
brave. As she observes, their influence has given rise to a lot of dry,
badly written, and unnecessarily complex commentary on the arts.
Paglia offers an alternate method of writing erudite, insightful crit-
icism on literature, art, and pop culture that is both accessible and
relevant to a wide range of readers."

A MEDIA CHRONICLE

463

Laura Shapiro, "An Intellectual Amazon: Is Paglia a radical thinker
or a media marvel?" Newsweek, September 21, 1992. Photo of Paglia
with bullwhip. Caption (from a classic Ann-Margret movie): "Kitten
with a whip: Paglia en garde."

"People in the News," San Jose Mercury News, September 22,
1992. "Today's Quote": Paglia comments on what the newspaper
calls "Madonna's hotly anticipated photo-fantasy book, titled Sex,
a work so racy it will be encased in a Mylar bag — penetrable only
with the help of a sharp object." Paglia says, "Short of going into
a convent, I don't know how she can top herself after this."

Stephanie Zacharek, "Uppity Bitch: Camille 101 is a richer course
than critics admit," Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement, September 25,
1992. Caption under photo (from 1991 M.I.T. lecture): "Brickbat
Tosser: Camille Paglia builds a tough argument with playful prose."
Begins: "If you sat down with a group of womenVstudies majors
and told them the story of a woman academic who, despite her fierce
intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of world culture, is despised
in certain academic circles, they'd be the first to chalk her fate up
to the oppressive patriarchal system. The reaction of many feminists
to Paglia's 1990 opus, Sexual Personae, and to the media blitz that
followed it, proves that the desire to squelch ideas that don't square
with your own isn't a purely white, masculine trait. Curious how,
even in the Nineties, a woman runs the risk of getting lynched for
being uppity."

Nat Hentoff, "Forbidden Books at Connecticut College," Washington
Post, September 26, 1992. Criticizes the fight over Sexual Personae and
says it was the students who "saved the book — and the intellectual
credibility" of the college: "Paglia sees literature and the rest of the
world as a tournament, and her mission is to unhorse fashionable
literary and intellectual figures and theories." See also Hentoff,
"When Students Teach Professors," The Progressive, February 1993.

"Feminism and Its Discontents: Susan Faludi, Camille Paglia, and
Naomi Wolf on Men, Women, Sex, Family Values . . . and each
other," Image magazine, San Francisco Examiner, September 27, 1992.

464

APPENDICES

Entire magazine devoted to full airing of the issues. See also letters,
October 25. [Significant that this debate was conceived (by editor
David Talbot) and published on the West Coast. The East Coast
media were then too dominated by the feminist establishment.]

Don Savage and Christine Wenc, "Camille Paglia: Boy, She Sure
Does Talk Fast!" The Stranger (Seattle), September 28, 1992. Inter-
view. Part two: October 5.

Melinda Bargreen, "Camille Paglia: thorn in the feminists' side,"
The Seattle Times, September 29, 1992. Inside headline: "A literary
pit bull attacks the conventional feminist wisdom." Paglia says: "Let
the feminists try to dismiss me. My feminism predates Steinem.
Today's feminists are the lackeys and minions of the tyrant, Gloria
Steinem. I evolved past the point where they began!"

Diana Walker, "Camille Paglia strikes a pose in lecture on feminism"
and "Camille Paglia loosens up," The Daily of the University of Wash-
ington (Seattle), September 30, 1992. Account of lecture at university.
Photo outside the hall of 60 Minutes cameraman filming socialist
protesters, none of whom had read Paglia's work. [In widely re-
broadcast footage from this lecture, Paglia declares: "My task as a
feminist intellectual is to attack cant, convention, and cliche wher-
ever they appear, in order to save feminism from its worst excesses.
I'm not trying to get rid of feminism. I'm trying to reform it from
within."]

Joan Smith, "The Original Feminist? Camille Paglia's no shrinking
violet, that's for sure," San Francisco Examiner, September 30, 1992.
Account of Paglia's lecture at the Herbst Theater. Huge photo by
Mike Macor of Paglia looking like a wind-blown La Pasionaria,
inflaming the crowd.

JoAnn Garflin, "Sex, Art, and American Culture," East Bay Express
(Los Angeles), October 1992. "It's time to board up the windows,
bury the silver, and send the children to stay with relatives in the
country. Camille Paglia is back. Reading Paglia is like knocking
back three espressos in a row. Your blood races, your eyes bulge,

A MEDIA CHRONICLE

465

you hyperventilate. Camille Paglia is the person Dorothy Parker
would have been if she'd had a Ph.D."

Fenton Bailey, "I, Paglia: Camille Paglia's greatest hits/' Paper (New
York), October 1992. Review. "Whether you agree — or violently
disagree — with Camille Paglia's porn of plenty (I love it), there is
no doubt that she has performed an invaluable service — reviving
the academic establishment from irrelevant extinction. From Oxford
to Harvard, academia has failed to make any sense thus far of pop-
ular culture. Either it has stuck its nose in the air, tut-tutting over
the lowbrow philistines swarming the plain, or it has condescended
to perform a cultural ascension on pop, making the comprehensible
incomprehensible by trussing it in a criticalese that is mere babble
to anyone but the snobs who have constructed the semi-idiotic code
for their elitist onanism. 'The Dionysian is no picnic!' Paglia pro-
claims, a 21st-century Boadicea with chain saws on her chariot
wheels, the better to cut down chaff like Susan Son tag, Naomi Wolf
and Meryl Streep — and anyone else who gets in her way."

Stuart Whitwell, "Nietzsche, Meet Madonna," Booklist, October 1,
1992. One of the best analyses yet of Paglia's thought. Whitwell
identifies "four overarching themes" in Sexual Personae and says that,
if readers keep them in mind, "Sex, Art, and American Culture will
begin to seem less like a fireworks display and more like a concerted
effort to shift the intellectual focus of twentieth-century thought."
His third category: "While liberals and conservatives were bickering
over how to deal with the historical changes brought about by the
collapse of religious authority, the rise of democracy, and the furious
pace of technological evolution, pop culture has risen up like a tidal
wave and changed the world so dramatically that the old quarrels
of liberals and conservatives now look facile and outdated."

Pat Califia, "Radical assessment," The Philadelphia Inquirer, October
4, 1992. Attack on Sex, Art, and American Culture. Those who think
the pro-sex wing of feminism is free of rabid political correctness
must see this uninformed, maladroit review, with its humorless,
grindingly formulaic Seventies-era politics. It calls Paglia "a failed
academic," "repetitious, hateful, and in the end dreadfully dull."

466

APPENDICES

"The Cultural Elite: Who They Really Are," Newsweek, October 5,
1992. Cover story about Vice-President Dan Quayle's charge that
a liberal "cultural elite" wields too much power in America. News-
week lists 100 people, including Paglia, in art, politics, academe, and
the media who constitute the "cultural elite." Paglia is identified as
"Cultural terrorist, author": "Why is the Ivy League so frightened?"
The false statement that Paglia "calls date rape 'sex as usual' " was
retracted by Newsweek on February 15, 1993.

MTV, interview with Madonna (Milan), October 6, 1992. Questioner
[British male voice]: "Are you familiar with the work of Camille
Paglia?" Madonna [correcting pronunciation]: "Paglia, yes." Q. "She
says female beauty is a potent form of power. Do you agree?" Ma-
donna: "Absolutely." Q. "In what way are you using your power?"
Madonna: "You mean I have to tell you? [laughs] How am I using
my power? By doing what I do. Well, it depends on what you do.
I mean, you could be a beautiful girl who just sits around the house
filing your nails all day, or you could be a beautiful girl who's out
there saying something, taking risks and trying to change people's
way of thinking, which is what I think I am. But I have to preface
all of that by saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There
are plenty of people who don't think I'm beautiful, so in that case
Camille's ideas are out the window [laughs loudly]."

Robert Taylor, "Camille Paglia's fiery essays on sex, art, and ed-
ucation," The Boston Globe, October 7, 1992. Review. "The ideas of
Camille Paglia go rat-a-tat-tat like the ammo clip of a Chicago piano.
As for feminism, Paglia suggests it might evolve if feminists started
reading Dante and Shakespeare instead of each other. The tradition
of learned eccentric — someone who's smarter than anyone else until
you realize he or she is also loopy — thrives in Paglia."

"This Week," San Francisco Weekly, October 7, 1992. Photo of Paglia
(signing books after lecture at Herbst Theater) rising to bow to and
kiss the hands of two majestic drag queens in black. In same issue:
Ann Powers, "Both sides now: Camille Paglia's vitriol doesn't make
room for an Axl Rose." Feminist attack on Paglia (alleging her
incapable of appreciating androgynous Axl Rose) that produced a

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467

flood of letters, printed November 4. Sample: "Apparently Powers
has not bothered to read Sexual Personae, which examines and cele-
brates androgynous sex appeal from Lord Byron to Elvis Presley."
[Paglia's admiration of Guns V Roses had been a matter of public
record for over a year.]

Adair Lara, "Dealing with Paglia's Sticks and Stones," San Francisco
Chronicle, October 8, 1992. Entertaining account of Paglia's lecture
at the Herbst Theater. "There's been such a depressing amount of
political correctness around lately, and Paglia reminds me of the
good old days of journalism, when you said whatever the hell you
liked and hoped no one showed up in your office the next day, looking
for a duel."

Edna Gunderson, "Lady Madonna: Who is that girl?" USA Today,
October 9, 1992. A weary Madonna, goaded by a reporter, gloomily
insists no one understands her. "Even rebel feminist Camille Paglia,
who hails Madonna as the feminist ideal, has miscalculated, she
says. T've heard her say things, under the guise of being adoring,
that make it very clear that she doesn't get me at all. I'm flattered
to a certain extent, but sometimes I think she's full of shit." Though
this was a minor item in the article, the inside headline blared:
"Paglia misses Madonna's point." [Paglia furiously phoned the of-
fice of Madonna's publicist to lodge a protest: "Do you know the
crap I've taken for two years from the rock press because of my
endorsement of Madonna?" During an interview that week on a New
York radio talk show, Paglia was prodded about Madonna's remark
but refused to criticize her, declaring that whatever Madonna-the-
person might do or say, nothing would shake Paglia's admiration
for Madonna-the-artist, the higher being.]

Jim Windolf, "OfTthe Record," New York Observer, October 12, 1992.
Account of incident at feminist panel discussion at the 92nd Street
Y on September 30, when CBS associate producer Claudia Weinstein
tried to ask moderator Gloria Steinem about Paglia but was re-
peatedly cut off. "Steve Kroft, the 60 Minutes correspondent who is
reporting the segment on Ms. Paglia, felt that Ms. Weinstein had
walked into a trap set by Ms. Steinem. Ms. Steinem, he explained,

468

APPENDICES

declined to be interviewed concerning Ms. Paglia until after Election
Day [November 3], but suggested herself that 60 Minutes attend the
talk at the Y. 'I think we were set up,' Mr. Kroft said. 'This is not
designed to be a glowing profile of Paglia — I don't want to char-
acterize it, actually — but one of Paglia's main points is that Steinem
and Faludi and mainstream feminist leaders don't tolerate any dis-
senting opinions. Without passing judgment on what happened, I
think Steinem proved Paglia's point.' "

Kathryn Robinson, "Camille Paglia's Ego: Feminist Camille Paglia
is the smartest, sexiest, most provocative intellectual of our time.
Just ask her." Seattle Weekly, October 14, 1992. On Paglia's lecture
at University of Washing